This effective date of change applies only to daily control forecasts. Soil temperature and moisture levels were added so that temperature and moisture values available from the MMINPUT files were fully utilized in the model. Thus Mesonet soil data may be used without model interpolation between levels in future model runs. Prior to the effective date of the change, the top soil level (10 cm) was initialized with the 12Z Eta model analysis, the 40 cm and 100 cm levels were linearly interpolated between the 10 cm and 200 cm Eta analysis, and the 200 cm model temperature was a linear interpolation between the 200 cm Eta analysis and the Eta annual deep soil temperature. This change is valid for ALL research-quality forecasts, regardless of the initialization date.

The constant multiplier in front of the XSCA solar radiation parameter was changed to 1.5E-5 for all forecast types. This value was tuned to match downward solar radiation observations from the Oklahoma Mesonet at Norman, Oklahoma on 20 July 2004. For more details, see MM5 Solar Radiation Tuning. This change was made in each forecast directory type, but does NOT apply to all forecasts, but is simply tested as an improvement for the 20 July 2004 case study.

The constant multiplier in front of the XSCA solar radiation parameter was tuned for specific cases. For details, again see MM5 Solar Radiation Tuning. The Python drivers were updated to include a setting for the tuning parameter and specific mm5.mpp executables were created for each XSCA setting.

RADFRQ changed from 30 minutes to 5 minutes in all directories.