APSIM^5.0 release notes

17^th March 2006

APSFront

APSFront has now been removed from the APSIM release and it's development has discontinued. It is recommended that all users migrate to the APSIM user interface. Introductory training workshops are held every six months and show how to use the new user interface to create and run simulations. Alternatively, the same exercises and material can be accessed at http://www.apsim.info/apsim/Training/Index.htm. These exercises are self paced and assume no knowledge of the APSIM user interface.

Sorghum

A new Sorghum module makes it's debut in this release. No changes are required to the control / parameter files to use this new module.

Run-time speed.

Some work has been done on APSIM to improve it's runtime speed. While APSIM 5 is almost twice as quick as the previous version 4.2, the chart below shows that there is still much to be done to improve APSIM's speed.

This chart shows the amount of time, in seconds, that it took for APSIM to run a 50 year continuous wheat simulation on the same hardware i.e. the changes to runtime speed are due to software and not improved hardware speed over the years.

Apsim user interface

• Support for complex rotations has been added, similar to the way APSFront did rotations.

• Grid cell handling has been improved so that cut/copy/paste/delete works in the same way as Microsoft Excel.

• A new memo/comment facility has been added so that users can add comments to their simulation.

• A new tracker capability has been added so that APSIM variables can be summarised e.g. average weekly/monthly rainfall, runoff etc.

• A new erosion capability has been added.

• Increased stability and a new look.

Apsoil

• Improved soil importing and exporting to and from spreadsheet and .par files has been implemented.

• A new look keeping it in line with the Apsim user interface has been added.

Screen

The screen module no longer exists. All control files will be automatically modified to remove the reference to screen. e.g. lines like the following will be deleted.

    module = screen   test.par [screen]