Getting Started with PyQt

Abstract

This note is by no means to try to replace the extensive PEST User’s Manual (http://www.sspa.com/pest/) and Surface Water Utilities Manual (http://www.sspa.com/pest/utilities.html). It only serves as a rudimentary guide for PEST novices of using PEST as a parameter estimation tool. In order to use PEST more efficiently, one is encouraged to read those two manuals very carefully. PEST is a model- independent parameter estimation program. It can be used to calibrate any model and conduct uncertainty analysis as long as the model reads in and prints out in ASCII format. But, in this note, we will only describe basic procedures of how to use PEST to calibrate SWAT model’s parameters. Regularization parameter estimation, predictive uncertainty analysis and parameter sensitivity analysis are not included in this note. After setting up SWAT simulation run in BASINS or AVSWAT interface, copy the entire txtinout directory into your working directory and keep the original txtinout directory intact so that if anything goes wrong, you will have backups to restore the damaged model input files. PEST carry out all the calibration or uncertainty analysis tasks by itself, it normally takes a few hours depending on model’s runtime and computer’s speed. User’s jobs involve (1) selecting adjustable parameters; (2) preparing initial and boundary values for the selected parameters; (3) preparing PEST files; and (4) running PEST and interpreting or utilizing PEST outputs. The first two tasks require the user’s knowledge about the model and they are implicitly included the task of preparing PEST files.