2.1.2 — Hybrid ET, bucket floor, reconciled closure
2026-10-14
- Hybrid ET bank. The root-zone water term used in the ET
formula now interpolates between the modern small-bank
factor (x10) and the original Wetspass-M 2016 large-bank
factor (x1000) based on how full the soil bucket is.
Full buckets transpire near-potential, matching the
original model in the wet season. Dry buckets are
moisture-limited, keeping spin-up convergence fast.
- Minimum bucket capacity floor of 50 mm. Prevents thin-soil
cells (bare land, urban) from overflowing on every rain
event and producing spurious recharge.
- Water Balance tab now reconciles focused recharge
correctly. The closure is computed as:
P - AET - (SR - R_focused) - R_total - dS
This is algebraically identical to the diffusive-engine
closure, but reports R_total as the headline number.
- New reconciliation modes auto-selected based on available
rasters: reconciled_focused, total_no_focused,
diffusive_only, no_recharge.
- No changes to the diffusive engine algebra. The closure
remains zero on converged runs.

2.1.0 — Boundary cropping, climate cap, focused-recharge fixes
2026-10-XX
NEW - Crop outputs to boundary tool
- Replaces the failing QGIS gdal:rasterize "Mask rasters" workflow,
which frequently errors with "Duplicate argument -ot" or silent
CRS-mismatch failures.
- File-selection dialog lists every .tif in the output folder,
grouped by variable and period, with a live filter box, Select
all / none / invert quick buttons, an "Only annual" selector,
and an "Only Recharge" selector. A running counter shows how
many files are selected.
- Auto-reprojects the boundary vector to each raster's CRS
(cached per unique CRS, so reprojection happens once per CRS
rather than once per file).
- Uses all_touched=True so edge pixels are retained. Critical for
hydrological water-balance closure.
- Writes cropped copies to output_dir/cropped_to_boundary/. The
original rasters are never modified.
- Runs on a background QThread so the GUI stays responsive.
Progress is reported in the tab's progress bar and log.
NEW - Physical cap on total recharge, derived from mean annual P
- "Recompute from inputs" reads rain1.tif ... rain12.tif from the
working directory and computes mean annual precipitation.
- Classifies P into one of five climate zones using the standard
reference table (Arid, Semi-arid, Humid temperate, Wet tropical,
Extreme cloud forest / karst) with recharge fractions of
1-5 %, 5-15 %, 20-35 %, 30-50 %, and 40-60 % respectively.
- Recommended cap = upper bound of the plausible recharge fraction
for the matched zone (frac_max x mean_P). This never clips
legitimate recharge.
- Optional override with a user-entered custom value.
- "Preview cap effect" button runs a read-only scan over the
combine inputs and reports, without writing any file, the
number of valid cells, before/after min-mean-max, the number of
cells that would be clipped, the mean drop across all cells,
and a binned distribution of clipped values (1-1.5x, 1.5-2x,
2-5x, 5-10x, 10-50x, 50-100x, 100x+ the cap).
NEW - User-selectable combine method for diffusive + focused
- Addition (default): R_total = R_diffusive + R_focused.
Correct when the two mechanisms are physically independent
pathways, which is the standard WetSpass-M assumption.
- Replace-by-max (conservative):
R_total = max(R_diffusive, R_focused). Avoids any risk of
double-counting, at the cost of a systematic underestimate at
every stream cell.
- Focused-over-diffusive: R_focused on stream cells, R_diffusive
elsewhere. For users who believe the diffusive model already
includes some streambed loss.
NEW - Optional capped focused raster output
- When the cap is enabled and the "Also write capped focused
raster" box is ticked, a separate file
Recharge_focused_annual_capped.tif is written alongside the
total. The original focused raster is never overwritten.
NEW - Climate regime auto-selected from rainfall
- P < 300 mm/yr        -> Arid
- 300 <= P < 700       -> Semi-arid
- 700 <= P < 1200      -> Mixed / transitional
- P >= 1200            -> Humid
- The gwdepth-based classifier is retained as a secondary
cross-check. The button is relabelled "Auto-detect from
gwdepth (secondary)".
FIX - Focused recharge broadcast error
- "operands could not be broadcast together with shapes..." when
the soil-derived Ks raster had a different shape from the D8
hydrology grid. The soil raster is now resampled to the D8
grid before Ks lookup.
FIX - Focused recharge mass balance
- Infiltration at a streambed cell can no longer exceed the water
physically available at that cell. This removes the 12,000+
mm/yr outliers that previously contaminated
Recharge_Total_annual.tif.
FIX - Focused recharge depth cap
- The annual focused raster now respects max_daily_depth_mm x
flow_days per month before summing.
FIX - Channel-width rasterization
- Removed the duplicate -ot flag from the gdal:rasterize call
used to build the channel-width raster. This eliminates the
"ERROR 1: Duplicate argument -ot" error that blocked
width-raster generation on some QGIS builds.
DOC - User guide updated to 2.1.0
- New chapter "Crop outputs to boundary".
- Rewritten Focused Recharge chapter covering the combine
methods, the climate-based cap, and the preview tool.
- New troubleshooting entries for the crop tool and the
climate-cap workflow.
- Updated file listing to include core/cropper.py.

2.0.5 — Resume, pause, and convergence improvements
2026-10-06
- Fixed a bug where a disk error (external drive disconnect, power
loss, or unexpected shutdown) overwrote the good checkpoint with
a stale one that said "resume from month 1", forcing a full
restart on Resume. The workflow now preserves the checkpoint
written after the last completed month, so Resume picks up at
the exact month and block where it stopped.
- Added read-side retries. A transient input-drive disconnect
during a read is now retried up to three times before the run
pauses cleanly, instead of crashing with a hard I/O error.
- Added a "Skip to final cycle" button on the Progress tab.
Once the soil-water bucket has essentially converged, you can
press it to abandon the remaining spin-up cycles and jump
straight to the final output cycle. The current cycle finishes
cleanly, then the workflow proceeds to the final pass.
- Added a 5 percent tolerance margin to the convergence test, so
residuals sitting on the numerical noise floor are recognised
as converged. This prevents the workflow from running an extra
spin-up cycle when the bucket is already at equilibrium.
- Fixed the Cancel button being inactive during a run. Cancel and
Pause are now enabled as soon as the worker starts.
- Pause now checks the pause flag between individual block writes
as well as at the start of each block, so the run stops within
one write instead of waiting for a whole block to complete.
- Added a "Resuming from checkpoint" line to the Progress log so
the resume position is visible.
- Fixed duplicate "[Check Inputs]" log lines. Auto-checks
triggered by switching to the Check Inputs tab or changing the
working directory no longer write to the run log; only an
explicit Check Inputs click does.
- Pass 1 (static lookups) no longer rebuilds on every resume
when the user supplies their own slope raster on the Inputs
tab. The workflow now correctly recognises the supplied slope
raster and skips the redundant Pass 1 rebuild.
- Simulated.tbl is now appended to, rather than truncated, when
a run is resumed. Months written before the pause are preserved
in the final file.
- The status bar no longer duplicates the full log line; it shows
a short summary of the most recent message.
- QGIS 4 readiness: qgisMaximumVersion raised to 4.99, so the
plugin is listed on the QGIS 4 Ready Plugins page.
- Full Qt6 compatibility: all Qt enums are fully scoped. Loads
cleanly in Qt5 and Qt6 without deprecation warnings.
- Replaced all remaining try/except/pass and try/except/continue
blocks with contextlib.suppress or a small helper function
across wetspass_plugin.py, ui/main_dialog.py,
ui/water_balance_tab.py, ui/worker.py, core/raster_io.py,
core/stream_io.py, and core/workflow.py. Fixes Flake8 B110
and B112.
- Renamed the ambiguous loop variable 'l' to 'line' in
ui/water_balance_tab.py. Fixes Flake8 E741.
- Replaced subprocess.Popen with QDesktopServices.openUrl for the
"Show in folder" button. Fixes Bandit B603/B607 without needing
suppression comments.
- Fixed metadata.txt continuation-line indentation and escaped
literal percent signs so the repository parser accepts the file.
- No functional or numerical changes to the model physics. Model
results are identical to 2.0.2 for the same inputs and starting
state.

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