Sometimes, the initial conditions play a big role on the overall performance of the model. Especially in the water bodies which have high stratification, the initial conditions would affect a lot on the simulations. We may choose some time for the spin up period of the model but in some cases we may not have the luxury to have the spin up period because of the limited data. In these cases, we may need to have the initial conditions as close as possible so that we could replicate the results as observed data. What would be the best model other than EFDC to use to find out the initial conditions for the EFDC model ? What other model can we use to find the initial condition of the water body which would compliment well with EFDC. I have found in some papers, researchers have used BETTER model to estimate the temperature and use that as the initial condition for the EFDC. I don’t know what would be the best way to do that ?
Regards,
John
Dear John, Please refer to Appendix A of the EFDC_Explorer6 User Manual, Appendix B, Data Format B6 (page 199 of 203) for information how to create the input file to set the initial conditions for temperature. Regards, EFDC_Explorer Development Team