The Atmosphere–Land Exchange Surface Energy (ALEX) balance model is an analytical formulation of the energy and mass transport within the soil and the vegetation canopy used for simulating energy, evapotranspiration, and CO2 fluxes in a wide range of vegetation environments. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of ALEX to simulate the effect of soil-surface leaf litter residu...

Summary crop growth models are promising tools for assessing crop yield potentials, but it is necessary to indicate uncertainties in model calculations that result from simplifying assumptions and errors/uncertainties in model input data and parameter values. The present study attempts to do this for soil factors that affect the water balance of land-use systems with sugarcane (Saccharum spp. L...

The spatially explicit and mechanistic model TREEGRASS was used to test the effects of tree density, tree spatial distribution, and tree size distribution on radiation absorption, net primary production (NPP), and, water fluxes for a West African savanna . The model has previously been shown to adequately predict radiation absorption, production, and soil water balance in humid savannas . Using...

This paper addresses and documents a number of issues related to the implementation of an advanced land surface–hydrology model in the Penn State–NCAR fifth-generation Mesoscale Model (MM5). The concept adopted here is that the land surface model should be able to provide not only reasonable diurnal variations of surface heat fluxes as surface boundary conditions for coupled models, but also co...

The monitoring of irrigation requirements at district or regional scale can be based on the use of ecological process-based models and remote sensing data. The former simulates the time evolution (usually at daily scale) of the main biophysical variables which determine crop photosynthesis and water consumption rates; the latter allows to provide the spatial distribution of these variables over...

[1] The soil water content plays a fundamental role in a number of important environmental processes, including those involved in the water cycle, vegetation dynamics, soil biogeochemical cycles, and land-atmosphere interactions. Despite the recent efforts spent in the analytical modeling of the stochastic soil moisture dynamics in dryland ecosystems, the probabilistic characterization of the s...

Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures ◭ ◮ ◭ ◮ Back Close Full Screen / Esc Papers published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions are under open-access review for the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Abstract Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures ◭ ◮ ◭ ◮ Back Close Full Screen / Esc Abstract The soil-water balance and plant water use are investi...

Evapotranspiration (ETc) partitioning and obtaining of FAO56 dual crop coefficient (Kc) for olive was carried out with the SIMDualKc software application for root zone and topsoil soil water balance based on the dual crop coefficients. A simplified two source-energy balance model (STSEB), based on daily remotely sensed soil and canopy thermal infrared data and retrieval of surface fluxes, also ...