Integrated modeling of radiation transfer, plant growth, and the movement of soil moisture in the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum (STEMMUS–SCOPE-WOFOST v1.0.0)

Accurate estimation of carbon assimilation and allocation plays a significant role in the plant growth and terrestrial ecosystems. The STEMMUS-SCOPE model integrates photosynthesis, fluorescence emission, and transfer of energy, mass, and momentum in the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum system, and has good performances in estimating water, energy, and carbon fluxes. However, the plant growth states (i.e., leaf area index (LAI) and plant height (PH)) are needed as inputs for running the STEMMUS-SCOPE model, and are obtained either from interpolating observations or taking as constants over the time. As a result, the physical interactions are not adequately captured between radiative transfer, plant growth and soil water movements. The objective of this study is to consider the plant growth in STEMMUS-SCOPE model via coupling a crop growth module (i.e., WOFOST module). The coupled STEMMUS-SCOPE-WOFOST model was evaluated with plant functioning measurements. The results indicate that the simulation of LAI and PH is significantly improved and consistent with the dynamic of the water stress and gross primary production (GPP). Besides, the additional generated state variables (i.e., the biomass of root, leaf, stem as well as yield) can also agree well with the observations. Finally, the interactions between the land surface fluxes, soil moisture dynamic and plant growth are all well simulated. The STEMMUS-SCOPE-WOFOST model provides a mechanistic window to link the satellite observation of solar-induced fluorescence to above- and below-ground biomass, land surface fluxes, and root zone soil moisture, in a physically consistent manner.