Shortwave radiation is an optional forcing data. It can be used for calculation of snow melt, ice on lake and rivers and potential evaporation. Some of the available model options for these processes depend on shortwave radiation, and use it either from this file or approximated from other input data.

The file is located in the modeldir folder. Shortwave radiation (MJ/m²/d) is given for all time steps. The SWobs-file is read only if readswobs is set in info.txt.

The first row is column headings. It holds a text string (e.g. 'date', no spaces allowed) for the first column, and integers in the form of station or subbasin ID numbers for the rest of the columns.

The first column is date-time. The default format is yyyy-mm-dd [HH:MM], where hour and minutes are necessary if the timestep is shorter than one day. The date-time is the beginning of the timestep. It is possible to use another date-time format: yyyymmdd[HHMM]. It is expected for all forcing files, if readformat 1 is set in info.txt.

The second to last columns are radiation for all stations or subbasins. The ID number (first row) may be swobsid or subid. If swobsid is used, several subbasins may use the same radiation time series. subid is defined in GeoData.txt. The order of subbasins in SWobs.txt does not have to be same as in GeoData.txt. swobsid may be defined in ForcKey.txt or GeoData.txt.

Example snippet of SWobs.txt file:

date         1234  1245 
1990-01-01   0.7     0.75  
1990-01-02   0.8     0.65 
... 

SWobs_nnn.txt holds shortwave radiation forcing data for sequence with seqnr nnn. For seqnr 0 SWobs.txt is used.