Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Transfer Schemes and Large-Scale Hydrological Models

Soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions determine, to a large extent, the global climate and the behaviour of the hydrological cycle. Several key issues in soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) models are poorly parameterized or simply not well enough understood. SVAT schemes include increasingly complex descriptions of the mechanisms governing vertical fluxes and characterizing surface properties is fraught with difficulties. Hence, data assimilation, whereby measurements are integrat...