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[1] A Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT) model, viz. Land Surface Process (LSP) model, is coupled with a widely used crop-growth model, DSSAT, to estimate energy and moisture fluxes at the land surface and in the vadose zone for growing vegetation. In this study, we present detailed observations of soil and crop characteristics, and various components of energy and water balance during a season-long field experiment for sweet corn. The data set is used to calibrate the LSP with Latin Hypercube Sampling and Pareto ranking. We compare the observations with model estimates of crop growth and development, land surface fluxes, soil moisture and temperature profiles from both the stand-alone LSP and coupled LSP-DSSAT models. We find that the model estimates of radiation fluxes, soil moisture, and soil temperature, by both the LSP and LSP-DSSAT are very similar, indicating that the LSP-DSSAT model can be used to simulate fluxes for dynamic vegetation without the need of in situ vegetation observations. Moreover, because coupling was achieved without structurally changing either of the models, the methodology in this study can be extended to coupling other SVAT and vegetation growth models.