SWAT+ Editor run errors | SWATGenX

SWAT+ Editor is the control surface for the SQLite project database; SWAT+ still executes against text inputs under TxtInOut. That split means you can have a “complete” Editor save while the solver never starts — or the solver exits without writing the success sentinel line SWATGenX searches for in simulation.out.

The success signal SWATGenX uses

check_model_completion opens Scenarios/Default/TxtInOut/simulation.out and returns success only if a line contains the substring “Execution successfully completed”. Otherwise it reports that model execution did not complete successfully — the same practical rule many hydrologists use when scripting QC.

path = f".../Scenarios/Default/TxtInOut/simulation.out"
for line in open(path):
    if "Execution successfully completed" in line:
        return True, "Model execution completed successfully"

Climate files and weather-sta.cli

check_detailed_meteorological_data starts from the PRISM directory under the user tree and parses Scenarios/Default/TxtInOut/weather-sta.cli to learn which station files the run expects for pcp, tmp, hmd, slr, and wnd. A missing directory or absent files yields an explicit meteorological status breakdown instead of a generic crash.

If you are debugging manually, align the station list in weather-sta.cli with files on disk before touching calibration — otherwise SWAT+ will fail early with little context in the UI.

Runtime and HRU complexity

QSWATPlus logs that HRU generation and TauDEM-dependent steps scale with basin size, lake topology, and DEM resolution — reliable wall-clock ETA is not available because lake merges and HRU creation vary nonlinearly. Very large HRU counts increase IO and memory pressure during simulation; automation does not remove physics, but it does remove hand-edited inconsistencies that often trigger the worst runtime pathologies.

From troubleshooting to a clean package

If delineation was wrong, Editor errors are often symptoms. Fix upstream topology first (see the QSWAT+ delineation guide), then rerun. When you use SWATGenX’s hosted pipeline, upstream gates reduce the chance you download a project that fails these checks.

Related guides

These pages are written for people hitting friction in desktop SWAT+ / QSWAT+ workflows — linked from methodology and SWAT+ model generation so they are crawlable, not orphaned.

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