How to find river_desc.nc for some river discharge processing

Author: A. Ducharne
Last revision: 2020/05/20

A particular output file is river_desc.nc, which contains the upstream area of each grid point of each river basin in which the routing is activated.

This information is very useful if you have doubts on the location of a gauging station in the simulated river network: due to the coarse resolution of the latter, a stream or a confluence can be misplaced in the simulated network, so the coordinates of a real-world gauging station fall in a grid-cell which does not correspond to good stream. In such a case, you must change the gauging station coordinate to match the location of the stream in the simulated river network. the River_desc file is very useful to this end, at least for large river, since you can evaluate which gric-cell has an upstream area matching the one of the real-world gauging station

river_desc.nc is produced if you activate the routing scheme and you set RIVER_DESC = y (default for the first simulated year in recent trunk versions. You will get information for the n largest river basins of the world, as defined by ROUTING_RIVERS = n (default value is 50).

If you need river_desc.nc and it has been produced, it is located in the output files, in SRF/Debug.