brook90r: Run the LWF-BROOK90 hydrological model from within R.

In hydrology, many R-packages exist that deal with pre- and post-processing of input data and results of hydrological process models. In addition, many ready-to-use algorithms exist in R providing automatic calibration, sensitivity analysis, and parallelisation techniques. In order to make the vast resources of R directly available to the 1D-SVAT model LWF-BROOK90, brook90r was developed to serve as an interface to the LWF-BROOK90 executable commandline program.

Basicly, brook90r features the following functionality in one function call:

• write input files from climate driving data, model control options and parameters,
• start the commandline-tool LWF-BROOK90,
• read and return the created output files.

The model control options thereby let you select different functions for defining aboveground stand dynamics, phenology, and root length density depth distributions. Additionally, a set of pedotransfer functions is provided to derive hydraulic parameters from soil physical properties.

Load brook90r

library(brook90r)

Load sample meteo and soil data

data("meteo_slb1")
data("soil_slb1")

Set up lists containing default model control options and model parameters

param.b90 <- MakeParam.B90()
options.b90 <- MakeOptions.B90()

Set new start and end dates in model control options

options.b90$startdate <- as.Date("2002-01-01")
options.b90$enddate <- as.Date("2004-12-31")

Derive soil hydraulic properties from soil physical properties using a pedotransfer function

soil <- cbind(soil_slb1, hydpar_puh2(clay = soil_slb1$clay,
                                     silt = soil_slb1$silt,
                                     sand = soil_slb1$sand,
                                     bd = soil_slb1$bd,
                                     oc.pct = soil_slb1$c_org))

Run LWF-Brook90 and store the results in b90.results.slb1

b90.results.slb1 <- Run.B90(project.dir = "example_run_b90/",
                            param.b90 = param.b90,
                            options.b90 = options.b90,
                            soil = soil,
                            climate = meteo_slb1,
                            path_b90.exe = "b90.exe")

The package works as intended and is fully documented.

The package is not on CRAN, so please use the devtools-package to install directly from github.com:

devtools::install_github("pschmidtwalter/brook90r")

Additionally, you will need to install the data.table package. Also important, though not required is Robert Nuske's vegperiod package.

install.packages("data.table")
install.packages("vegperiod")

You can use the package's functions without carrying out any water balance simulations. However, the central function Run.B90 will only work with the windows commandline tool 'b90.exe' which is not publicly available. The interested user can obtain 'b90.exe' directly from the Bavarian State Institute of Forestry (LWF), Departement Soil and Climate.

Paul Schmidt-Walter

GPL-3 for the package. License for LWF-BROOK90 is unknown.