Retrieval of time series LAI by coupling an empirical crop growth model with a radiative transfer model

Continuous LAI values are very important in crop growth monitoring, however, all of the remotely sensed LAI products are limited by the temporal and spatial resolution. High spatial resolution is good for crop monitoring but with very poor temporal sampling. The popular MODIS 8 day LAI product is still not sufficient for crop monitoring. An empirical crop growth model was developed based on two years´ ground truth. It was then coupled with SAILH model to retrieve the continuous LAI day by day. A rolling inversion strategy was proposed further to minimize the random noise in the observations. The models coupled inversion was tested by simulation inversion. Results show significant improvements of the new inversion method.