Abstract. The leaf area index (LAI) is a crucial parameter for understanding the exchanges of momentum, carbon, energy, and water between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. To improve the ability to simulate land surface water and energy balances, the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) has been successfully coupled to the Community Land Model (CLM) by assimilating global remotely sensed LAI data with explicit carbon and nitrogen components (CLM4CN). The purpose of this paper is to determine the best algorithm for LAI assimilation. Within this framework, four sequential assimilation algorithms, i.e., the Kalman Filter (KF), the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), the Ensemble Adjust Kalman Filter (EAKF), and the Particle Filter (PF), are applied, thoroughly analyzed and compared. The results show that assimilating remotely sensed LAI data into the CLM4CN is an effective method for improving model performance. In detail, the assimilation accuracies of the ensemble filter algorithms (EnKF and EAKF) are better than that of the KF algorithm because the KF is based on the linear model error assumption. The PF algorithm performs worse than the EAKF and EnKF algorithms because of the gradually reduced acceptance of observations with assimilation steps. In other words, the contribution of the observations to the posterior probability during the assimilation process is reduced. The EAKF algorithm is the best method because the matrix is adjusted at each time step during the assimilation procedure.