This project is supposed to be a community effort, leveraging all the work that has been done in Land Surface Modeling from various groups around the world. The ultimate goal here is to build a Soil-Plant-Atmosphere continuum (SPAC) bio-physical model that represents the state of the art and can be coupled to the Climate-Machine, i.e. Caltech's CLIMA initiative. The model will include multi-layer soil and canopy properties and models "observables" that can be used as constraint, e.g. Solar Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) on the leaf-level propagated through the canopy, reflectance in various bands as measured from space, soil and vegetation moisture content. A specific focus will be on water-carbon feedbacks by testing recent developments in stomatal optimization theories as well as plant hydraulics. We will try to adhere to some coding structure developed by Gordan Bonan (https://github.com/gbonan/CLM-ml_v0) but implement parts from other programs, such as SCOPE (https://github.com/Christiaanvandertol/SCOPE).

The entire model will be written in Julia (Julia: "Looks like Python, feels like Lisp, runs like Fortran", https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h8rQyEpiZA&t=), which should make the barrier of entry lower for incoming students, PostDocs, etc). If you want to contribute, please contact us ([email protected]).