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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-5417</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>LAWS: A new crop&amp;ndash;water coupling model integrating an agricultural module into a process-based hydrological model (CWatM v1.08)</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Fu</surname>
<given-names>Zhonghao</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yang</surname>
<given-names>Shuqiu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Fridman</surname>
<given-names>Dor</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3908-3571</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Smilovic</surname>
<given-names>Mikhail</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9651-8821</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Du</surname>
<given-names>Taisheng</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6146-0217</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Makowski</surname>
<given-names>David</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Burek</surname>
<given-names>Peter</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6390-8487</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chang</surname>
<given-names>Jinfeng</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4463-7778</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Luo</surname>
<given-names>Xuanqin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Wenfeng</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8699-3677</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Efficient Utilization of Agricultural Water Resources, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>National Field Observation and Research Station (Gansu Wuwei) for Efficient Water Utilization in Oasis Agriculture, Wuwei, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Center for Agricultural Water Research in China, College of Water Resources and Intelligence Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Water Security Research Group, Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Université Paris-Saclay, INRAE, AgroParisTech, UMR 518 MIA-PS, Palaiseau, France</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Agricultural Remote Sensing and Information Technology, College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>28</day>
<month>10</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>35</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Zhonghao Fu et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5417/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5417/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5417/egusphere-2026-5417.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5417/egusphere-2026-5417.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>It is essential to jointly represent crop growth, water availability, and human water management in an integrated framework to understand future water-food interactions. Although existing large-scale coupling models have improved the representation of crop-water interactions, few integrate detailed crop growth and hydrological processes, together with their interactions, within a unified process-based framework. Here, we developed the Large-scale Agriculture Water System model (LAWS) by integrating a process-based agricultural module into the Community Water Model (CWatM). We evaluated its performance in simulating crop growth dynamics and yields across six experimental sites and at global, national, and grid-cell levels for maize, wheat and soybean. Results showed that, at the site level, LAWS reproduced the main seasonal dynamics of leaf area index and biomass for different crops and regions. Pearson temporal correlations between simulated and reference global yield-anomaly series were 0.68, 0.14, and 0.54 for maize, wheat, and soybean, respectively. Across the top 20-producing countries, the correlations between simulated and reference long-term mean yields were 0.74, 0.79, and 0.32 for maize, wheat, and soybean, respectively. At the grid-cell level, the simulated long-term mean yields showed broad spatial patterns consistent with those in the global gridded yield dataset. Overall, the yield performance of LAWS was broadly comparable to mainstream global crop models, supporting its application to large-scale assessments of crop production. Furthermore, LAWS can represent the interactions between crop growth and the water cycle, providing a framework for sustainable agricultural planning under water constraints. Through a case study, we demonstrated this capability by assessing the contribution of nonrenewable groundwater to irrigated maize production globally. In addition, its open-source and modular architecture facilitates further development to improve the simulation of agricultural systems, the water cycle, and human water management.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="35"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Key Research and Development Program of China</funding-source>
<award-id>2024YFC3213700</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>52679062</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs3">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>52239002</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs4">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>32361143871</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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<back>
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