Elevation bands in SWAT+

[Rodrigo Marinao Rivas]

Hello everyone,

I direct my question to this group since I think it is a specific question about the model itself.

I would like to know if the possibility of including elevation bands is fully implemented in both the SWAT+ model and its graphical interface. In QSWAT+, in the definition of HRUs, an option to generate up to 10 elevation bands explicitly appears, but after the creation of these HRUs I don't see any specification in the attribute table regarding the generated bands, also later in the "TxtInOut" folder I can't find any file where the number of bands or the elevations associated with each one of them is defined. The closest thing I find is the file "snow.sno" but it doesn't have these definitions. I am relatively new to working the SWAT+ model so I apologize in case the question has an obvious answer or if it is only due to some obvious error that I am making in the implementation of the model, but I have not found anything that clarifies my doubts about this topic in the manuals or forums, and at this point I would like to first know if the implementation of elevation bands  is possible or not, and where to go in case it is.

Beforehand thank you very much!

Rodrigo

[Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini]

Dear mailing list,

I'm trying to migrate a SWAT2012 project to SWAT+, and I'm very interested in how to define the parameters of elevation bands in SWAT+.

So, I would highly appreciate if somebody could provide some advice for Rodrigo's question about how to set up elevation bands in SWAT+ (after creation in QSWAT+).

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini, PhD

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Department of Civil Engineering
Faculty of Engineering and Sciences
Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco, Chile
http://hzambran.github.io/
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"Life goes by so fast, that if you don't stop
and look around, you might miss it"
(from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off)
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Linux user #454569 -- Linux Mint user

[Dean Koch]

I am having the same problem. Setting elevation bands in QSWAT+ seems to have no effect on the configuration files produced in TextInOut by SWAT+ Editor. I expected to see tlapse, plapse or similarly named parameters appear somewhere (probably "snow.sno"?), but I'm finding nothing.

I wonder if the developers could weigh in - was this feature dropped in SWAT+ or are we missing something? There doesn't seem to be any info in the SWAT+ documentation

I am using QSWAT+3 64bit v1.1.1 and SWAT+ Editor v2012.10_7.23 . Perhaps this was fixed in the new 2.0 releases?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks

[Natalja C.]

Hello,

Please try the latest release of the software.  It wasn't present (disabled) in the previous versions.

Best,

Natalja 

[Dean Koch]

Thanks for the quick response Natalja. I tried again with the latest release (QSWAT+ 2.0.4, QGIS 3.16.4, and SWAT+ Editor 2.0.0) but I'm still having no luck. I also tried setting the "elevBandsThreshold" and " numElevBands" global variables in PyQGIS at various points after the hrus.py module is initialized but this seems to have no effect.

Either way, QSWAT+ (and SWAT+ Editor) will build the model without complaining but they don't appear to be setting up the elevation bands. The snow database "snow.sno" always has a single row, "snow001" and I can find no variables for lapse rates, initial data, etc

I have noticed that in the "Create HRUs" dialogue in QSWAT+, the "Elevation bands" button available at first, but after clicking 'Read', it is greyed out. Maybe this is a clue?
 

Any ideas what's going wrong, or how i can work around this issue? I am okay with editing TxtInOut files manually, but I would need some guidance on parameter names, etc

Thanks again for your help