How are Soil Color set in Noah?

[ZhouYanQiao]

By running Noah in its entirety using the Vector scheme (multipoint scheme), I found that I was not asked to provide a ‘soil color’ during the entire process. However, the technical note for Noah describes that soil colour is required for soil reflectance calculations.
In addition, I found noahmp%config%domain%SoilColor = 4 in noahmp-master\drivers\hrldas\ConfigVarInTransferMod.F90.
Does this mean that Noah's default soil colour is 4. May I ask why it is set this way?

[cenlinhe]

Currently, Noah-MP by default prescribes the soil color to be category "4" which has a medium dark color (i.e., medium value for soil albedo). This parameter can be tuned or changed based on specific applications. We are currently working on enhancing this capability to allow the model read in a 2-D spatially varying soil color global dataset. This capability hopefully will be available to the community in the next few months. In the meantime, I would suggest users tune this parameter based on their applications or adding an I/O capability to use their own spatially varying soil color map.