CABLE

The Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model


What is CABLE?

CABLE is a land surface model, used to calculate the fluxes of momentum, energy, water and carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere and to model the major biogeochemical cycles of the land ecosystem.

How is CABLE used?

CABLE can be run as a standalone model, driven by prescribed meteorology. CABLE can be run for a single location, a region or globally. CABLE can also be used as part of an atmospheric model. CABLE provides the land surface component of ACCESS1.3. (Kowalczyk et al., 2013), ACCESS1.4 and ACCESS-ESM1.

Who uses CABLE?

The CABLE community is made up of around 100 researchers from 30+ organisations. The code has a long history of use and development within CSIRO and has been available to the wider research community from around 2006. CABLE-2.0 was released in late 2012. In April 2015 CABLE-2.0 became available under an open source license [PDF] replacing the previous academic and research use license. Registration is required to access the CABLE code repository and is available at https://trac.nci.org.au/trac/cable/wiki/CableRegistration.

More information


CABLE annual reports


Recent publications using CABLE

  • Best, M; Abramowitz, G; Johnson, H; Pitman, A; Balsamo, G; Boone, A; Cuntz, M; Decharme, B; Dirmeyer, P; Dong, J; Ek, M; Guo, Z; Haverd, V; van den Hurk, B; Nearing, G; Pak, B; Peters-Lidard, C; Santanello, J; Stevens, L; Vuichard, N. (2015) The plumbing of land surface models: benchmarking model performance. Journal of Hydrometeorology; 16:1425-1442. doi:10.1175/JHM-D-14-0158.1 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JHM-D-14-0158.1
  • De Kauwe, MG, Kala, J., Lin, YS, Pitman, AJ, Medlyn, BE, Duursma, RA, Abramowitz, G, Wang, YP and Miralles, DG (2015) A test of an optimal stomatal conductance scheme within the CABLE land surface model. Geosci. Model Dev. 8:431-452,doi:10.5194/gmd-8-431-2015 http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/8/431/2015/gmd-8-431-2015.html
  •  Wang, YP, Zhang, Q, Pitman, AJ and Dai YJ (2015). Nitrogen and phosphorus limitation reduces the effects of land use change on net atmosphere-land CO2 Environmental Research Letters, 10, 014001, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/014001.