VIC

Criterion

Explanation

General Description

VIC is a macroscale hydrologic model that balances both surface energy and water over a grid mesh, typically at resolutions ranging from a fraction of a degree to several degrees latitude by longitude.

Model Domain

VIC is a land surface model (LSM); the model domain is near-surface atmosphere and land surface hydrological processes.

Developer

Currently maintained by University of Washington (UW) Computational Hydrology Group; development over the course of two decades by UW, Princeton University, and collaborators around the globe.

Hardware computing requirements

No special hardware requirements; runs on a variety of platforms.

Code language

C

Original application

Representing land surface processes for general circulation models (GCMs).

Public/proprietary and cost

Publicly available source code.

Physically or empirically based

Physically based.

Mathematical methods used

VIC solves a water or water and energy balance calculation at each grid cell at each user-defined time step. Following this computation, flows are routed over a landscape using the Saint Venant equations.

Input data requirements

Meteorological forcing (temperature, precipitation, wind etc.), parameterization of soils, vegetation parameters (landcover, rooting depths, etc.).

Outputs

Default outputs are moisture and energy flux (including runoff), snowpack information, and information about frozen soil or lake domains, if applicable.

Pre-processing and post-processing tools

Model website has a basic collection of scripts and tools for preparing inputs, plotting results, and converting output to standard netCDF format.

Representation of uncertainty

No explicit representation of uncertainty.

Prevalence

Widespread use among climate and hydrological applications, with hundreds of published applications in the peer-reviewed literature. There are applications of it across the Western U.S., and the model has been used for runoff modeling as part of the CalAdapt tool for California climate change analyses (https://cal-adapt.org/tools/streamflow/).

Ease of use for public entities

Model setup and use requires specialized training, but VIC has been used for major studies published by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Elsner at al., 2014) and CalAdapt.

Ease of obtaining information and availability of technical support

There is an active user group (VIC listserve)

Source code availability

Source code is publicly available on Github

Status of model development

Model is mature, having been in widespread use since the 1990s. Over this time numerous improvements in the VIC model have been made. The current version of VIC available for download is 4.2. Available on the internet at:

Challenges in integration