A canopy level soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer model is used to simulate components of the daily surface energy budget. The Sellers et al. (1992b) model is used to relate unstressed canopy conductance to the fraction of the incident photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by the canopy and the simple ratio vegetation index. The multivariate randomized block permutation (MRBP) procedure is used to obtain values for a number of parameters used in environmental stress functions and the aerodynamic resistances. It is shown that the MRBP procedure was able to improve the LEAF model predictions for three responses (i.e., net radiation, sensible, and latent heat fluxes). When comparing model predictions to the observations for the four intensive field campaigns of the First International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project Field Experiment, the model performance is reasonably good. The difference in the parameterization of canopy conductance between the Sellers et al. (1992b) model and the LEAF model is discussed. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995