Water Systems Integrated Modelling framework, WSIMOD: A Python package for integrated modelling of water quality and quantity across the water cycle

Abstract

The water cycle is highly interconnected; water fluxes in one part depend on physical and human processes throughout. For example, rivers are a water supply, a receiver of wastewater, and an aggregate of many hydrological, biological, and chemical processes. Thus, simulations of the water cycle that have highly constrained boundaries may miss key interactions that create unanticipated impacts or unexpected opportunities (Dobson & Mijic, 2020;Liu, Dobson, & Mijic, 2022). Integrated environmental models aim to resolve the issue of boundary conditions, however they have some key limitations (Rauch et al., 2017), and in particular we find a significant need for a parsimonious, self-contained suite that is accessible and easy to setup.

Modelling water quantity and quality for integrated water cycle management with the Water Systems Integrated Modelling framework (WSIMOD) software

“…WSIMOD is provided open source under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause license. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/imperialcollegelondon/wsi (last access: 26 March 2024) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7662569 (Dobson et al, 2023b), and documentation is at https:// imperialcollegelondon.github.io/wsi/ (last access: 26 March 2024), with further technical details in Appendix A. The code has been tested up to Python 3.10 and requires minimal dependencies (see website).…”

“…We have created a tool to implement this modelling philosophy, the Water Systems Integrated Modelling framework (WSIMOD), which is an open-source Python package for flexible and customisable simulations of the water cycle that treats the physical components of the water cycle as nodes connected by arcs that convey water and pollutant fluxes between them. The software source code and online tutorials are published by Dobson et al (2023a); in contrast, this paper presents WSIMOD's theoretical underpinning with a discussion on model setup and of integrated wa-ter system modelling in general. To address the difficulties in application associated with integrated modelling mentioned above, WSIMOD contains a library of built-in component representations covering a more complete water cycle coverage than any identified integrated models and a default but customisable orchestration deemed to be suitable for many catchments and regional water systems coordination.…”

Modelling water quantity and quality for integrated water cycle management with the WSIMOD software

“…We have created a tool to implement this modelling philosophy, the Water Systems Integrated Modelling framework (WSIMOD), which is an open-source Python package for flexible and customisable simulations of the water cycle that treats the physical components of the water cycle as nodes connected by arcs that convey water and pollutant flux between them. The software source code and online tutorials are published by Dobson, Liu, and Mijic (2023a), in contrast, this paper presents WSIMOD's theoretical underpinning with a discussion on model setup and of integrated water system modelling in general. To address the difficulties in application associated with integrated modelling mentioned above, WSIMOD contains a library of built-in component representations covering a more complete water cycle coverage than any identified integrated models, and a default but customisable orchestration adjudged to be suitable for many catchments and regional water systems coordination.…”