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.