Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) Macroscale Hydrologic Model

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Note

You are viewing the documentation for VIC version 5 (VIC-5). Relative to VIC-4, this version includes many infrastructure improvements. Those enhancements are described in Hamman et al, 2018.

VIC (Liang et al., 1994) is a macroscale hydrologic model that solves full water and energy balances, originally developed by Xu Liang at the University of Washington. VIC is a research model and in its various forms it has been applied to most of the major river basins around the world, as well as globally. The VIC model is distributed under the MIT license. If you make use of this model, please acknowledge the appropriate references listed on the references page. These should include Liang et al., 1994, Hamman et al., 2018 for VIC-5, and any references relevant to the features you are using, which are cited in the feature descriptions on the Model Overview page.

Development and maintenance of the current official version of the VIC model is led by the UW Hydro | Computational Hydrology group in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. Every new application addresses new problems and conditions that the model may not currently be able to handle, and as such the model is always under development. The VIC model is an open source development project, which means that contributions are welcome, including to the VIC documentation.

All development activity is coordinated via the VIC github page, where you can also find all archived, current, beta, and development versions of the model.