Estimation of energy fluxes and photosynthesis from thermal infrared, spectral reflectances, microwave data and SVAT modeling

Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT) models have been implemented to simulate energy and mass fluxes between soil, vegetation and atmosphere of various ecosystems. Usually, these models are simple, but they use realistic descriptions of radiative, turbulent and water transfers. These include description of stomatal control of transpiration and CO/sub 2/ fluxes. They can be used for assimilating remote sensing data and derive vegetation canopy evapotranspiration or photosynthesis. Various remote sensing data may provide useful information to drive SVAT models. Surface temperature may be used through inversion procedures to retrieve parameters related to stomatal conductance or root zone soil moisture. Parameters related to vegetation structure (LAI, vegetation height) may be retrieved from reflectance measurements in the solar domain, either through direct relationships with some vegetation index or by inverting radiative transfer formulation against spectral reflectance measurements. The microwave data contribution has not been studied very often in the case of vegetation canopies, but they were proposed for estimating surface soil moisture. In this paper, inversions of the ALiBi model were performed to retrieve canopy evapotranspiration from thermal infrared, spectral reflectances and microwave data on two water stressed soybean crops. In a previous study, thermal infrared data alone were used to invert the model on plant water status parameters, while other parameters, related to canopy structure and soil surface water status, were prescribed from in situ measurements. In the present study, spectral reflectance and radar measurements were used to retrieve canopy structure parameters (LAI and vegetation height) and surface soil moisture by inverting radiative transfer models.