Pest calibration warning

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KAED MORSKAD

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Jul 22, 2025, 6:55:35 AMJul 22
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Hello dear Community members,

I am trying to calibrate a model with modelmuse and pest but unfortunately i get this message when i rung pestcheck, does anyone have an idea why i am getting these warnings 


PESTCHEK Version 18.27. Watermark Numerical Computing.

Errors ----->
No errors encountered.

Warnings ----->
Parameter bounds scaling has been activated. Ensure that parameter bounds
  represent pre-calibration parameter uncertainties.
A value was supplied for the SPLITSWH variable. However no value was
  supplied for SPLITTHRESH for any parameter group.
MAXSING in the singular value decomposition section is greater than the
  number of adjustable parameters.

Special warning ----->
The PEST control file appears to contain comments and/or lines that employ
  PEST++ or PEST_HP input protocol. If a particular PEST utility program
  objects to this file, strip the file of these features using the PSTCLEAN
  utility.        

Thank you in advance.

Jakab Andras - Gmail

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Jul 22, 2025, 9:36:56 AMJul 22
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These are warnings that normally don't cause problems for PEST. Nevertheless, you should take them into account. E.g., double check your parameter bounds and make sure they do reflect the natural parameter variance; I.e., they reflect 4 or eventually 6 sigma distance btw. the upper and lower bounds (if parameters are log transformed, then take also that into account).

As far as the other warnings are concerned, I'm not sure how you made those settings causing the warnings. A normal PEST setup through standard GUI tools shouldn't cause inconsistent settings in the PEST control file, so I'm afraid you made alterations to your PEST setup after the control file was first generated by the GUI. An indication for that might also be the last warning, which tells me that you removed some parameters from the inversion, but didn't fully rebuild the control file causing MAXSING to remain at a previously set value.

When using PEST to calibrate a model, you should first make sure your model is at least conceptually correct and manually calibrated to some extent, and then understand the basic concepts behind PEST. Please refer to the freely accessible documentation from the PEST website.

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KAED MORSKAD

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Jul 22, 2025, 11:15:40 AMJul 22
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Dear Jakab,

Thank you for your clear explanation. It turns out that in my Pest package i did not include all the additional packages necessary for Pest to run successfully. Now is doing the iterations but as i choose 50, it is taking some time. Thank you for letting me know what to consider, since I am new to model calibration. 

Best regards,
Kaed

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