The code makes assumptions about the units of the fields read in from the forcing files as follows:
| potential temperature: | degrees C |
| salinity: | g/g |
| wind stress: | dyne/cm2 |
| restoring time scale: | days |
| heat flux: | W/m2 |
| precipitation: | kg/m2/s |
| air temperature: | degrees K |
| humidity: | kg/kg |
| wind speed: | m/s |
| cloud fraction: | dimensionless, varying from 0 to 1 |
| ice_mask: | dimensionless, varying from 0 to 1 |
Any input data that isn't in the correct units can be multiplied by a renormalization factor specified by a component in the namelist variable vector *_data_renorm. The components of this vector match up with the order of the fields in the forcing file. For example, salinity data sets are often in psu (ppt), while the model expects msu(g/g) = (0.001)psu, so the user can specify sfwf_data_renorm(1) = 0.001 in the namelist if sfwf_formulation = 'restoring' or 'bulk-NCEP'.