In research, the SWAT source codes are usually modified to add new features or integrate new algorithms. To demonstrate the improvement, it’s often required to compare with the official unchanged SWAT model.
SWAT Output Viewer supports to quickly compare the SWAT outputs from two different SWAT versions. These two version could be from SWAT team or from any research institute. The comparison could be done at any spatial and temporal scale with charts, tables and statistics.

The steps to compare two SWAT version follows:

Step 1: Place the executable of the two SWAT versions in the swat_exes folder. By default, there are five SWAT executable files in this folder which are for different SWAT versions. Any compatible SWAT versions could be placed here to be used for comparison.Step 2: Open a SWAT project and run the simulation with the two versions in scenario view. This is done by choosing the scenario node in Project Explorer and then select the versions from the drop-down list in the main view.

After the simulation, you should find two new nodes created for each SWAT version in Project Explorer. This node is the SWAT version node, which is corresponding to the SWAT version. The example shown below is the Project Explorer with two SWAT versions (SWAT_627 and CanSWAT) running with scenario default_v3. The results from these two versions could be compared as they are based on the same scenario.

Step 3: Expand one of the model version node and select the results to be compared, e.g. SNOMELTmm of subbcatchment.

Step 4: Choose the other model from the Compare with drop-down list to setup the comparison.

The results from the two SWAT versions (SWAT_627 and CanSWAT) will be compared in the chart, where the data from current version (SWAT_627) is shown in red and the data from the compared version (CanSWAT) is shown in blue.

Notes:

The SWAT output system has been modified to allow different outputs for the same scenario. If your model version is not in the default list, please contact me.