Context and objectives
Our general objective is to develop process models of vegetation functioning that can be used at regional and global scale for predicting carbon and water exchanges between land surface and the atmosphere. Vegetation functioning refers to the temporal development of vegetation such as carbon uptake, phenology, carbon pools, biomass and its allocation within the various plant components. In a first step, we will focus on the assessment of fluxes at the seasonal time scale. The specific objective of this sub-project is to develop and validate VEGETATION based methods for calibrating such vegetation process models.
We plan to address the following topics :
* development, assessment, improvement of assimilation techniques of SPOT-4 HRVIR and VEGETATION measurements (actual or simulated, including SWIR band) in vegetation models;
* most of vegetation processes strongly depend on water availability. We plan to couple vegetation process models with a SVAT model in order :
- to improve soil moisture estimates
- to supplement satellite measurements in the optical domain (HRVIR, VEGETATION) by thermal infrared data to add more constraints on the models through multispectral assimilation
* investigation of the use of combined high and low space resolution to account for sub-grid surface (vegetation, soil) heterogeneity
* assessment and improvement of "ecological rules", combined with assimilation techniques to further constraint the system or provide parameters which cannot be derived from satellite measurements.
Project outcome
Expected scientific results
| Project leader(s): | ULg - Laboratory for Planetary and Atmospheric Physics | |
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