SUEWS 2026.6.5 is out. The headline is that we’ve updated the YAML configuration schema to 2026.5. This is the latest step in a long tidy-up of the configuration surface: field names are now consistent snake_case, the physics options read as words rather than opaque numeric codes, the STEBBS block is fully snake_case, and model.control has been reorganised so forcing and output each sit under their own sub-object. The aim is simple: a config should be readable and greppable, and you should be able to tell what a setting does from its name.
You don’t need to hand-edit anything to come across. Existing configs upgrade in a single pass with suews-schema migrate, and the transition guide lays out the renames. The one thing we’d flag, if you bring your own forcing files, is that the forcing header is now read and matched against the canonical column names rather than ignored, so it’s worth checking your column headers line up (and you can now pass per-land-cover LAI and water-use columns if you have them).
We’ve also been experimenting with an early agent plugin that lets an AI assistant (Claude or Codex) drive SUEWS through structured tools: scaffolding, inspecting, validating and running configurations. It’s very much a preview and still moving, so treat it as such; we’d be glad to hear how it goes if you try it. This agent will also feature in our first SUEWS Community Hackathon (24 June, UCL East), where participants drive SUEWS in plain language to model urban heat and bridge it to human risk; do come along, or follow the outcomes there.
The science underneath stays on solid ground: this release is about the configuration surface and the tooling around it, and we’ve verified the model results stay consistent with the previous release, so you can move to 2026.6.5 with confidence. The full list of changes is in the release notes and the documentation, and the release is archived on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.20555317) if you need to cite it.