One of the advantages of reanalyses is that many different sources of observations are combined in a global gridded consistent system. We have a brief overview of MERRA and the challenges facing reanalyses published in the online IEEE magazine Earthzine www.earthzine.org. There are a number of interesting interviews and articles at the site as well.
We will have a short course at the AMS Annual meeting January 11 in Phoenix AZ. It will cover an overview of the system and physics, the validation that we have already done, but the most important and interesting component will include several hands on tutorials working with data online. Given that the volume of data will be quite large, the subsetting and previewing tools should be useful to researchers to target the data they require. The audience will likely be graduate students or researchers who work directly with the data. Several tools that are used regualrly at the GMAO to manipulate the data, formats and grids will be demonstrated.
The announcment is on this page: http://www.ametsoc.org/MEET/annual/call.html and the registration is currently open. The AMS will shortly publish an agenda, and we are currently working on adding more details to that regarding the tutorials.
While MERRA won't be completed by then, it will be nearly halfway complete. Also, by then data will be accessible online.
Production of MERRA data has been progressing at 10 days per day on three streams, which is what is expected. Data monitoring is going on regularly, and the system seems to be moving along at the expected data quality. We have some time series routines being run, and will report on those when we achieve 8 full annual cycles. Currently, Streams 1 and 2 have more than 2.5 years each, and stream 3 has 22 months.
The MERRA File specification document has also been updated and reflects exactly the data files being produced. The document can be found at the bottom of the MERRA home page, and a link is provided here.
