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Welcome!

This wiki site was built to provide guidance for people working on hydrological modelling projects in South Africa, with a focus on catchment-scale modelling.

Catchment modelling entails a lot of decision-making, from how many and which land cover types to include in a model, to which modelling software tool to use for a project. The goal of this site is to assist people in making informed decisions in this process and contribute to the ‘wise-use’ of modelling for the benefit of water resources management. You can find more details about the scope of this wiki here.

This wiki is a living resource: there are discussion pages and the user community can suggest updates. A moderator group will review content changes.

The idea for this site came from a group of early-career hydrologists facing many tricky modelling decisions in their research and projects. The Water Research Commission (WRC) funded the initial development of the material through the “Critical catchment model inter-comparison and model use guidance development” project (2019-2021). This project included a review of the structures and use experience across several commonly used modelling tools in South Africa:

• • • the Pitman model, including WRSM-Pitman & SPATSIM-Pitman
    • ACRU
    • SWAT
    • MIKE-SHE.

More information and reports from that project are found here.