Running the VIC Model

Source Code

  • To download the latest VIC source code, proceed to the download page.
  • The code is packaged in a compressed tar archive. Extract the contents via:

tar -xvzf filename

where `filename` = name of the file you downloaded, e.g. VIC_code_4.2.b.tar.gz

Compile VIC

  • Change directory, cd, to the source code directory (extracted from the compressed tar archive above)
  • At the command prompt type:

make

  • If this completes without errors, you will now see a file called vicNl in this directory. vicNl is the executable file for the model.

Run VIC

At the command prompt, type:

vicNl -g global_parameter_filename

where global_parameter_filename = name of the global parameter file corresponding to your project.

If you'd like to capture VIC's screen output in a log file, you can do (in C-shell):

vicNl -g global_parameter_filename >& log.txt

where global_parameter_filename name of the global parameter file corresponding to your project.

log.txt = name of a log file to contain VIC's screen output.

Other Command Line Options

VIC has a few other command line options:

  • vicNl -v: says which version of VIC this is
  • vicNl -h: prints a list of all the VIC command-line options
  • vicNl -o: prints a list of all of the current compile-time settings in this executable; to change these settings, you must edit vicNl_def.h and recompile using make clean; make.