Multiangular data which will be available with the upcoming satellite platforms (EOS, ENVISAT, ADEOS) offer a great potential for monitoring land surfaces on the global scale to the extent that physically based models describing the transfer of radiation can be developed. The present study constitutes an additional step toward modeling this radiative transfer with in particular the physical processes involved at the boundary between land vegetated surfaces and the atmospheric layer above. Our primary objectives are to address issues related to the perturbation by an atmospheric layer of the solar radiance field incident on the top of the vegetation canopy and the interpretation of the radiance field emerging from the atmospheric layer when isotropic scattering from the surface is a priori assumed. Indeed, the application of an inappropriate model for the interpretation of remotely sensed data can produce inaccurate retrievals of both the surface and atmosphere characteristics. In the present study the radiation transport problem in this coupled system is solved analytically for uncollided and first collided radiation and uses a discrete ordinates method for multiple-scattered radiation. A sensitivity analysis of the multilayered ice-water-aerosol-vegetation-soil model is conducted in order to quantify the effects of atmospheric and surface perturbations within the whole system. The results are essentially reported in terms of bidirectional reflectance factors at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, which allows the use of very different radiative properties of the vegetation layer. The consequences of assumptions made on one or the other of these media are investigated through an inversion experiment.¿ 1997 American Geophysical Union