Soil and Water Assessment Tool: Computer modelling workshop

A 4-day SWAT training workshop was held from May 3-7, 2010 at McGill University and was attended by a CIMH hydrologist. The first two and a half days were designed to introduce new users to the model; review necessary and optional inputs; and familiarize the user with the ArcGIS interfaces. This was followed by one and half-day workshop that covered sensitivity analysis, model calibration, and uncertainty analysis using the 2005 version of SWAT with an ArcGIS interface. The last day of training was open to Q&A, and participants were encouraged to bring their own dataset projects and conceptual modeling questions.

SWAT, or the Soil and Water Assessment Tool, is a public domain model actively supported by the USDA Agricultural Research Service at the Grassland Soil and Water research laboratory in Temple, Texas, USA. The main purpose of the model is to predict the effects of management decisions on water, nutrients, sediments and pesticide yield with reasonable accuracy on large, ungaged river basins. It is a distributed model that simulates all previously mentioned constituents on a daily time step. SWAT defines hydrology by a specific list of parameters including interception, evapotranspiration, surface runoff, lateral flow, soil percolation and ground water flow as well as river routing processes. Please visit the SWAT website for further details about SWAT and a free software download.

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