Characterizing and understanding shortwave radiative transfer inside a vegetation canopy is essential because of the climatologically significant interactions between the Earth's atmosphere and the land surface. Particularly relevant is the radiation intercepted by the canopy elements which reveals the structural and optical vegetation properties. In this study, a tractable physical model of radiation interception is developed which accounts for multiple scattering to be applicable for near infrared. This model performs rather well whenever compared to the exact computation of the radiative transfer equation or a detailed code of radiative transfer. It seems to be, however, less relevant for thin vegetation canopies having large single-scattering albedo. Its simple expression makes it useful to derive quantitative estimates of radiation intercepted by the canopy which will lead to improved retrievals of main vegetation parameters such as leaf area index. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996