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 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). In 2023 the model code was subjected to a thorough rewriting, and many modules have been totally rewritten from scratch that lead to the current version of the FeST model.
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.
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