FOREST CENTURY PARAMETERIZATION WORKBOOK
Bill Pulliam, NREL, Colorado State University, rev. Feburary 1996. This document may be freely redistributed electronically in its entirety only. Authorship and this notice must be retained.
This workbook is designed to lead you through the full parameterization of CENTURY for a particular site, adjusting all the parameters that control short-term and long-term behavior. The goal is to help you work through the maze of parameters and understand how they can be calculated from real-world data. It does not delve into the full complexity of the model, but rather glosses over some of the more involved subtleties which can be very important for particular applications.
The CENTURY Parameterization workbook is not a substitute for the CENTURY User's Manual. It is a supplement that assumes you have a basic knowledge of how to edit parameter files, construct schedule files, run the model, and examine outputs. If this is not yet true, you should experiment with the parameter files that are supplied with the model and become familiar with its basic operation before jumping into an intensive implementation for your site.
This document is structured as a workbook, with spaces for you to enter all pertinent data and parameter values. You are frequently prompted for literature sources for your data. In many cases the source will probably be "personal communication", "reasonable estimate", or "wild guess", but it is good to keep a record of this anyway. From our own experience with the evolution of CENTURY and CENTURY parameter files over time, you will find a detailed record of your initial workup of the data and parameters to be an extremely valuable reference.
Happy modeling!
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The following file is an Excel workbook for some of the curves in the Century model. It allows you to experiment with setting the Century input parameters that control the shape of the curve so you can see how the parameters you have selected affect the shape of the curve used in the simulation.
