Linking GoldSim to Python-Enabled Excel

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

I recently presented a webinar called "Effectively Working with Excel", demonstrating some of GoldSim's Excel interface features. In addition to demonstrating how GoldSim can import/export data, I also talked about how GoldSim can dynamically interact with Excel during a simulation. One of the attendees asked me if GoldSim will wait for user-defined functions to be called by external programs, DLLs, or scripts used by Excel before reading in values from Excel. At the time, I didn't have a ready answer because I couldn't think of a time that I've actually seen this done.  

To answer his question, I built a simple GoldSim model that interfaces with an Excel file and this Excel file relies on user-defined functions written in a Python script. I thought this example might also be useful for a wider audience, so I decided to blog about it.

Simulating Precipitation with Long-Term Droughts

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

One of GoldSim's most popular models downloaded from our Model Library is the GoldSim implementation of a Stochastic Weather Generator (WGEN). This model simulates probabilistic climate that drives hydrological processes in environmental systems models, such as precipitation, temperature and solar radiation.

One of the limitations of this model is that the generated precipitation time series generated by the model doesn't account for long-term drought cycles. Using the National Integrated Drought Information System (by NOAA), we can apply the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) to precipitation generated by WGEN to account for droughts. This blog post summarizes an approach used to incorporate droughts for a site during the years 1910 - 2022 and found to produce results that compare well to the historic precipitation measured at a site in Manti, Utah.

The GoldSim Contaminant Transport Module Online Course is Now Available!

Posted by Rick Kossik

Over the last two years I posted six excerpts from the Contaminant Transport Module Online Course. I had promised that it was under development and would eventually be posted in full. I posted the last of these excerpts a year ago and then went silent, so you may have wondered "what happened?". With the exception of the last excerpt, these were from the (early) conceptual parts of the Course. The remainder of the Course is "hands-on" and procedural and would not have necessarily worked well in a blog format. Hence, the silence. Well, FINALLY (after 2 years of effort) the full Course is now available. In this post, I briefly provide an overview of what you can expect.