Wednesday, July 30, 2008

MERRA mail list

A mail list has been established to pass on news and alerts regarding MERRA especially the data. Send an email to majordomo@listserv.gsfc.nasa.gov with the body of the message "subscribe merra-news"

You will receive a message with instructions to confirm the subscription.

Friday, July 25, 2008

AMS Annual Meeting - Abstract deadline Aug 1

There is a planned session on reanalyses at the AMS Annual meeting, co sponsored by the Committee on Hydrology and Climate Variability and Change Committee. The deadline is August 1. Please see the call for papers:
http://www.ametsoc.org/MEET/annual/index.html

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Status July 17

Late last week, the computing platform running MERRA was brought down for scheduled maintenance including an upgrade to the operating system. When it was brought back online, numerous scripts and control jobs for MERRA were broken. The science and executables for MERRA remain, but the control of jobs and data flow needed to be patched for the new OS. At this point, the three MERRA streams are processing forward. However, some post processing scripts are still being patched, such as the information on our Production Progress and Quick View pages. Those should be back on line in a few days.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Brief Comparison with Interim Reanalysis

Recently the ECMWF Interim reanalysis has been released (see http://data.ecmwf.int/data/). We have a quick overlap and look at a comparison with MERRA at monthly time scales for January 1998.

The figure below shows two features of the MERRA system we have been tracking since the system was under development, 1) negative zonal wind bias in the tropics and extratropics and 2) dry bias in the lower troposphere, especially the tropics. These are apparent against each of the existing long reanalyses (see the quick look page for more comparisons). However, in comparing ERA40 and the new Interim reanalyses with MERRA, the magnitude of the differences is smaller compared to Interim.

At this time monthly files are not available on the ECMWF site. When those become available for download, we will integrate the Interim data into the quick look pages for comparisons.



(Gary Partyka, GMAO, downloaded the Interim data and performed the comparison and evaluation.)