ISBA is a soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) scheme developed at the National Center for Meteorological Research (CNRM) at Météo-France which is used to model the exchange of heat, mass and momentum between the land or water surface and the overlying atmosphere. The model is used in so-called stand-alone mode for development, and in coupled mode in which the model supplies the lower boundary conditions to atmospheric numerical weather prediciton models or the upper boundary conditions for distributed hydrological models. ISBA is currently coupled to the Météo-France operational numerical weather prediction model (ARPEGE), the Météo-France climate model or GCM (ARPEGE-climate), the non-hydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric model Meso-NH, and the distributed macroscale hydrolgic model MODCOU (see Projects for more details).

    The model has been written in both Fortran77 and Fortran90. The Fortran77 code has been run on UNIX (HP, CRAY YMP) and Linux platforms. The Fortran90 code has been run on a UNIX (HP, CRAY YMP, Fujitzu) platform. A working document is currently available for use with the Fortran90 version of the model. There are also several sample case studies available for testing/validation of a SVAT scheme.