WSIMODanywhere: Ready-to-use integrated water system modelling anywhere in England from open data

WSIMOD is an integrated water modelling framework that enables the representation of flow and water quality interactions across scales, sectors, and processes within complex water systems. Due to its integrated and flexible nature, WSIMOD allows for hydrological processes, infrastructure, land use, and management decisions to be jointly simulated. Recent developments have significantly expanded its analytical capabilities, including bespoke modelling of wetlands, improved representation of groundwater dynamics, and integration with optimisation-based approaches, strengthening its relevance for applied water management and policy analysis.

Despite these advances, a key barrier to wider adoption remains the substantial effort required to preprocess heterogeneous datasets and configure integrated water system models for specific catchments. This limits model reuse, slows uptake by practitioners, and constrains comparative analysis for regional and national applications. To address these challenges, we present WSIMODanywhere, an automated pipeline for data preprocessing, model generation, and initial parameterisation for any catchment or sub-catchment in England. The model can be accessed via an interactive web interface, free of charge for research, allowing users to select a geographic area and obtain a ready-to-use WSIMOD configuration created using openly available, pre-processed datasets. We present baseline historic simulations of WSIMODanywhere from regional to national scale, and discuss model performance when using a baseline, uncalibrated and data-driven configuration of WSIMOD, in which parameters are estimated solely from publicly available data without site-specific calibration. We then outline a pipeline for further model improvement through regional fine-tuning and additional data integration and discuss potential applications of a national-scale integrated water system model.