Land surface models have an increasing scope. Initially designed to capture the feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere as part of weather and climate prediction, they are now used as a critical tool in the urgent need to inform policy about land-use and water-use management in a world that is changing physically and economically. This paper outlines the way that models have evolved through this change of purpose and what might the future hold. It highlights the importance of distinguishing between advances in the science within the modelling components, with the advances of how to represent their interaction. This latter aspect of modelling is often overlooked but will increasingly manifest as an issue as the complexity of the system, the time and space scales of the system being modelled increase. These increases are due to technology, data availability and the urgency and range of the problems being studied.

地表模型的范围越来越大。最初旨在捕捉土地和大气之间的反馈，作为天气和气候预测的一部分，现在它们被用作迫切需要为不断变化的世界中的土地使用和用水管理政策提供信息的关键工具身体上和经济上。本文概述了模型通过这种目的变化而演变的方式以及未来可能会发生什么。它强调了区分建模组件内科学进步的重要性，以及如何表示它们相互作用的进步。建模的后一方面经常被忽视，但随着系统的复杂性、被建模系统的时间和空间尺度的增加，将越来越多地表现为一个问题。这些增长是由于技术，