FeST reference manual#
FeST is a spatially distributed hydrological model, developed at Politecnico di Milano (www.polimi.it) by the Real Time Hydrology Group (www.fest.polimi.it). FeST is the acronym of “flash–Flood Event–based Spatially distributed rainfall–runoff Transformation” that denotes how the first release of the model was initially developed by Mancini (1990), as a model oriented to the simulation of rainfall-runoff transformation of single flood events. Later the FeST model was merged with the soil water balance scheme from TOPLATS model (Famiglietti and Wood, 1994), transforming it into a continuous model (Montaldo et al., 2007). Then the FeST code was redesigned and rewritten from scratch while keeping the basic assumptions of the previous release (Rabuffetti et al., 2008). In 2011 the FeST was upgraded with a routine to solve the system of water mass and energy balance in order to better simulate the actual evapotranspiration and interface the model to remotely sensed data (Corbari et al., 2011; Corbari & Mancini, 2014). At the same year, 2011, a new module for simulating groundwater flux and river-groundwater interaction was developed and implemented in the FeST (Ravazzani et al., 2011). In 2013 a new version of the code was released built on top of the MOSAICO library (Ravazzani, 2013). In 2014 the FeST was upgraded with a module for glaciers modelling (Boscarello et al., 2014). In 2021 a forest growth component was implemented in the FeST (Feki et al., 2021).
FeST has been applied to a wide range of water resources applications such as discharge assessment for flood risk analysis (Ravazzani et al., 2014), flood forecasting (Amengual et al., 2017), soil moisture assessment and forecasting for irrigation scheduling (Ceppi et al., 2014; Ravazzani et al., 2017), impacts assessment of climate and land-use changes on water resources availability and flood severity (Ceppi et al., 2022; Ravazzani et al., 2015; Gaudard et al., 2014; Ravazzani et al., 2014).
This document provides documentation about the equations and algorithms implemented within the FeST model in order to simulat hydrological processes.