Phase: RAMI4PILPS
The Ecological Assimilation of Land and Climate Observations (EALCO) model [Wang, 2005, 2008; Wang et al., 2007, 2009] is a process-based land surface model developed to simulate ecosystem-atmosphere interactions.
EALCO physically integrates remote sensing and other geospatial data using up-to-date ecological theories.
EALCO focuses on the mechanistic coupling of ecosystem physical, physiological and biogeochemical dynamics.
The main components of the EALCO model include land surface radiation, energy, water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles.
The radiation module of EALCO uses a gap probability-based successive orders of scattering approach [Wang, 2005; Wang et al., 2007].
It explicitly includes the heterogeneities of stands and crown elements and the multiple scattering of radiation.
The model treats vegetation canopy as being composed of 3-D crowns and separates canopy into userdefined vertical layers (10 in this experiment) for ray tracing.
The EALCO model is based on the optical parameters of ecosystem elements and physically represents ecosystem processes in radiation transfer.
The model takes into account three processes when radiation impinges onto a canopy element: reflection, transmission, and absorption.
The model simulates direct and diffuse solar radiation separately at userspecified number of wavelengths or wave bands.
To carry out the RAMI4PILPS experiments the radiation module was run in stand-alone mode (i.e., decoupled from the other surface processes in EALCO).
The total CPU processing time was a few seconds.
The source code of EALCO is written in Fortran and it was executed under the Windows XP operating system on a machine with 3.25 Gb of RAM.
