SCOPEinR
Section · Simulation tool
SCOPEinR
SCOPEinR provides an R interface to the SCOPE model, enabling coupled simulations of radiative transfer, photosynthesis, and energy balance. It is particularly suited for studying canopy stress responses, energy partitioning, and fluorescence dynamics across environmental conditions.
SCOPEinR
Coupled radiative transfer & energy balance
SCOPEinR is an R package implementing the Soil Canopy Observation, Photochemistry and Energy Fluxes (SCOPE) model, originally developed in MATLAB by Van der Tol et al. (2009) and further extended by Yang et al. (2020). The package enables simulations of interactions between radiation, vegetation canopies, soil, and the atmosphere within a single, coupled radiative transfer and energy balance framework.
SCOPEinR also powers the online RT-Simulator, providing a Shiny-based interface that allows users to simulate top-of-canopy (TOC) reflectance, canopy temperature, and chlorophyll fluorescence emissions under variable meteorological and structural conditions. This makes the package particularly useful for analysing vegetation stress, energy partitioning, and photochemical efficiency.
For systematic intercomparison with other radiative transfer (RT) models, SCOPEinR can be used together with ToolsRTM, enabling parallel simulations across different RT formulations (leaf-level, canopy-level, and RTM-based flux retrievals).
Within the Virtual Biophysical Lab, SCOPEinR can be used to:
- Simulate canopy fluxes, temperature, TOC reflectance, fluorescence (SIF), and energy balance.
- Compare environmental scenarios such as drought, heat stress, stomatal closure, or nutrient limitation.
- Generate synthetic diurnal cycles for benchmarking against flux-tower observations (e.g. GPP, LE, Rn).
- Support forward simulations for evaluating RT parameterisations and hybrid machine-learning inversion pipelines.
The SCOPEinR and ToolsRTM packages are integrated into RTM-Suite, which provides interactive Shiny apps for real-time simulations and visualisations, plus the full R and Python documentation for both packages.
R + Python · RTM-Suite
SCOPEinR is now available in R and Python
SCOPEinR has been ported to Python as part of RTM-Suite, the joint documentation and demo site that keeps the R and Python versions numerically in sync and cross-verified against each other.
