FeST user’s guide

FeST user’s guide#

Last update: May 2025

FeST is a spatially distributed grid-based hydrological model, developed at Politecnico di Milano by the Real Time Hydrology Group since the 1990s. FEST is the acronym of “flash–Flood Event–based Spatially distributed rainfall–runoff Transformation” that denotes how the first release of the model was oriented to the simulation of rainfall-runoff transformation of single flood events. After the first version was released, the FEST model has been subjected to continuous improvement and several hydrological processes have been integrated in the original code, transforming the FeST into a continuous integrated hydrological model.

Several hydrological models have been derived from FeST such as AFFDEF [Moretti and Montanari, 2007], and DIMOSOP [Ranzi et al., 2003].

The FeST model has been designed to be applied across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. All internal state variables (discharge, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, snow water equivalent, groundwater head, etc…) can be written as output. All output can be written as time series at user-defined points or areas. The user has complete control on the saving of the output data, thus minimising any waste of disk space or CPU time.

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, Ravazzani et al., 2014], 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, Gaudard et al., 2014, Ravazzani et al., 2014, Ravazzani et al., 2015].

Check out the content pages bundled with this guide to see how to use the FeST model.