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VIC5

Overview

This package is a continuation of VICmodel maintained by Zhong Ruida.

VIC5 is an R implementation of the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) macroscale distributed hydrologic model (Liang et al., 1994) originally developed by Xu Liang at the University of Washington (UW), USA, and currently the model is maintained by the Computational Hydrology group (UW Hydro) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW. This R package is developed by Ruida Zhong, Dongdong Kong, et al. at the Center for Water Resources and Environment, Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). This package is built based on the VIC source code V5.0.1 (Hamman et al., 2018), aim to for the more convinient use for the R users and other users or researchers using windows platform.

The VIC model can simulate several land surface processes physically based on both water balance and energy balance, e.g. Evapotranspiration (on vegetation canopy, vegetation transpiration and soil evaporation), runoff (surface and underground), changes of soil moisture, soil ice and soil temperature of each soil layer, accumulation and melt of snow, sensible and latent heat flux between atmosphere and land surface, streamflow of the basin outlet (needed to be coupled with a runoff routing model), and many other variables. The landsurface parameters (about vegetation, soil, topography) and the timeseries of meteorological data (meteorological forcing, including precipitation, air temperature, incomming shortwave and longwave radiation, wind speed, air pressure and vapor pressure) are necessary inputs to run the VIC model.

For more information about VIC please see the official documentation website of VIC.

Installation

You can install VIC5 from github with:

# Via github
remotes::install_github("rpkgs/VIC5")

Or get it from the CRAN repository:

install.packages("VIC5")

Example

This is an example to run the VIC model using the sample inputs:

library(VIC5)
#Sample data, with 16 gridcells and 10 day hourly meteorological forcing inputs
data(STEHE)

forcing <- STEHE$forcing
soil <- STEHE$soil
veg <- STEHE$veg

# Options and settings of the VIC model
vic_params(list(
  date_start = "1949-01-01", 
  date_end = "1949-01-10", 
  step_per_day = 24, 
  snow_step_per_day = 24,
  runoff_step_per_day = 24
))

# Definition of model outputs (output variables, timescale, etc.)
out_info <- list(
  wb = list(timescale = 'hour', aggpar = 6,
            outvars = c('OUT_RUNOFF', 'OUT_BASEFLOW', 'OUT_SOIL_MOIST'),
            aggtypes = c('sum', 'sum', 'end')),
  eb = list(timescale = 'day', aggpar = 1,
            outvars = c('OUT_SWE', 'OUT_SOIL_TEMP'),
            aggtypes = c('avg', 'min'))
)

# Run the VIC model
outputs <- vic(forcing, soil, veg, output_info = out_info)

# Show information of model run and outputs.
print(outputs)

References

  • Liang, X., D. P. Lettenmaier, E. F. Wood, and S. J. Burges (1994), A simple hydrologically based model of land surface water and energy fluxes for general circulation models, J. Geophys. Res., 99(D7), 14415-14428, doi:10.1029/94JD00483.

  • Hamman, J. J., Nijssen, B., Bohn, T. J., Gergel, D. R., and Mao, Y. (2018), The Variable Infiltration Capacity model version 5 (VIC-5): infrastructure improvements for new applications and reproducibility, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 3481-3496, doi:10.5194/gmd-11-3481-2018.

  • https://github.com/Sibada/VICmodel

  • https://github.com/UW-Hydro/VIC

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Version

Install

install.packages('VIC5')

Monthly Downloads

211

Version

0.2.6

License

GPL-3

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Maintainer

Dongdong Kong

Last Published

February 17th, 2023

Functions in VIC5 (0.2.6)

VIC5

VIC5: The Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) Model version 5 in R
NSE

Several metrics to evaluate the accuracy of hydrological modeling
XAJ.param.range

XAJ parameters
vic_params

Get or set global parameters of the VIC model.
STEHE

Sample datasets of the Stehekin for the running of the VIC model provided by UW Hydro
veglib_IGBP

IGBP vegetation library for VIC model
print.vic_output

VIC model run for each gridcells
vic_version

Display version of VIC model and this package.
XAJ

Run Xinanjiang (XAJ) model (three sources, lumped).