Limitations and Improvements of the Leaf Optical Properties Model Leaf Incorporating Biochemistry Exhibiting Reflectance and Transmittance Yields (LIBERTY)

Leaf Incorporating Biochemistry Exhibiting Reflectance and Transmittance Yields (LIBERTY) models the effects of leaf biochemical concentrations on reflectance spectra on the basis of Melamed theory, which has several limitations. These are: (1) the radiation components are not treated satisfactorily; (2) the directional changes of both particle and sublayer scattering ratios are not considered; and (3) the boundary constraint which makes needle leaves different from broadleaves is not included. Proofs of these limitations as well as theoretical improvements are given in this study. Global sensitivity analysis (SA) of three models: the original LIBERTY, our improved LIBERTY (LIBERTYim) and The optical PROperties SPECTra model (PROSPECT) suggests that compared with LIBERTY, the global reflectance and transmittance of LIBERTYim are more sensitive to diametrical absorbance αd—a parameter related to leaf biochemistry. Moreover, the global reflectance and transmittance of LIBERTYim and PROSPECT had similar sensitivity patterns to the input variables, demonstrating indirectly the validity of our improvements over LIBERTY. However, neither LIBERTY nor LIBERTYim considers boundary constraints, which limits their applications in modelling needle leaf optical properties. We introduced a particle string model, which might be used to simulate needle leaf optical properties in the future.