“…Boone et al: The interactions between ISBA-MEB in SURFEXv8 past 2 decades, LSMs have evolved considerably to include more biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes in order to meet the growing demands of both the research and the user communities (Pitman, 2003;van den Hurk et al, 2011). A growing number of state-of-the-art LSMs, which are used in coupled atmospheric models for operational numerical weather prediction (Ek et al, 2003;Boussetta et al, 2013), climate modeling (Oleson et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2015), or both Masson et al, 2013), represent most or all of the following processes: photosynthesis and the associated carbon fluxes, multi-layer soil water and heat transfer, vegetation phenology and dynamics (biomass evolution, net primary production), sub-grid lateral water transfer, river routing, atmosphere-lake exchanges, snowpack dynamics, and near-surface urban meteorology. Some LSMs also include processes describing the nitrogen cycle (Castillo et al, 2012), groundwater exchanges (Vergnes et al, 2014), aerosol surface emissions (Cakmur et al, 2004), isotopes (Braud et al, 2005), and the representation of human impacts on the hydrological cycle in terms of irrigation (de Rosnay et al, 2003) and ground water extraction (Pokhrel et al, 2015), to name a few.…”