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.

陆地表面模型的范围不断扩大。它们最初旨在捕获土地和大气之间的反馈，作为天气和气候预测的一部分，现在被用作迫切需要为不断变化的世界中的土地利用和水利用管理政策提供信息的关键工具身体上和经济上。本文概述了模型随着目的的改变而演变的方式以及未来的发展趋势。它强调了区分建模组件中科学进步与如何表示它们相互作用的进步的重要性。建模的后一个方面经常被忽视，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，它会越来越明显地成为一个问题。这些增长归因于技术、数据可用性以及所研究问题的紧迫性和范围。