A new release of the NicheMapR package is now available at releases, which includes a correction and some additional features.
The correction is to the soil moisture algorithm. The value in Campbell’s program 11.1 for VP (saturation vapour density) is fixed at the value for 20 degrees C and this was copied into the microclimate model code. However, it should vary with temperature and this correction has now been made (using the WETAIR function internal to the microclimate model). It will affect near surface (<5 cm) soil moisture calculations in particular.
The additional features are to make the following parameters from the soil moisture model available to the user to alter: root radius, resistance per unit length of root and leaf, critical leaf water potential for stomatal closure, stability parameter for stomatal closure equation, maximum allowable mass balance error for soil moisture, maximum iterations for mass balance of soil moisture.
Also, the wavelength-specific solar radiation can now be outputted if required, with the option to undertake a more intensive calculation of the UV wavelengths if desired.
The model output now includes the snow temperature profiles in the sun and the shade (sunsnow and shadsnow) as well as plant outputs from Campbell’s Program 11.1 (transpiration rate, leaf and root water potentials in the output matrices plant and shadplant).
Finally, thanks to Rafael Schouten we now have an operational compilation for Linux (you can get this from github).