Introduction
The VIC model, first developed in 1994, is a macroscale hydrologic model used to solve full water and energy
balances. In addition to hydrologic processes, VIC models land-surface interactions and flow routing. The model
simulates land-atmospheric fluxes, and water and energy balances on the land for each grid independently, and
then routes estimated surface flows and base flows to produce streamflows from the network of grids. The model
can be used for a variety of applications, for example, streamflow simulation and forecasting, water and energy
balance calculations, reservoir water management, and climate change studies. The VIC model has been applied to
most major river basins around the world. Key features of the VIC model is its open source availability, and its
ability to perform studies on a continental scale. Most of the VIC model has been written in C, except for the
flow routing model, which was written in Fortran 77. The model is not memory-intensive, but very input/output
intensive. The source code is publicly available.
