Status Feb 15

The MERRA Stream 1 (starting Jan 1979) has been progressing steadily, up to mid March 1979. We've had a look at Jan 1979, and it looks to be within expectations. The second two streams are on hold, mainly because there are some short experiments still being run.

However, it has also come to our attention that the CRTM team are fixing a bug in the coefficients for MSU radiances. Stream 1 won't assimilate these until July 1979, but the second stream will assimilate these immediately. The hold for the short runs will continue through next week, at which time the status of the update to these coefficients will be reevaluated. However, all indications are that the reanalysis should not proceed until these are included in the CRTM. This is an interesting development. We'll run some tests of the impact of the bug fix.

So, in the mean time, we can continue the processing of the Stream 1, and evaluate it along the way. Some results will be posted in the next couple days.

Status Feb 10

One of the last few fixes included in the system (discussed in the previous update), one that should have been minimal impact, greatly affected some code in the data assimilation. The result was that many wind observations that should have been assimilated were not. The problem was apparent (actually the system crashed), so the fix has been fixed.

There have also been several down times in the last week while some updates were made to the computing platform. So far, it looks like the data stream starting in 1979 has been running continuously (or at least regularly) over the weekend. It is up to 15 JAN 1979 after starting on Friday in December 78. So, if all goes well, by Tuesday we should see the first month of MERRA data.

With all the down time, some short reprocessing experiments that the GMAO is producing for instrument team support have been delayed. So, there is a backlog that is being cleared out. Once clear, the second two streams will be restarted from Jan 1989 and Jan 1998, respectively.