Hurricane Andrew, Aug 1992

MERRA Stream 2 has completed through 1993. We have been looking at various weather and climate events. Hurricane Andrew was a powerful, but fairly small hurricane. MERRA's 1/2 degree resolution is likely too coarse to adequately resolve the circulation, and there is no bogus or center relocation being done in the system. Still, assimilation of observations will show some circulation or feature.

There isn't much of a circulation prior to landfall in Southern Florida. Landfall was at 9Z24Aug1992. Figure 1 shows the sea level pressure and wind barbs from 6Z the closest analysis time before landfall. The pressure center is much higher than the observed center pressure (955 mb). the center of the pressure is located south of the best track at that time. The feature that really attracted attention is the offset of the wind circulation, even further south than the pressure center, and crossing the isobars at the center.

Figure 1 MERRA Sea Level Pressure and 1000 mb wind barbs from the 6Z 24 AUG92 analysis. The blue line shows the best track befre and after landfall, with red markers at 00Zs.

A closer look at the observations being assimilated shows that ERS1 did track over the center of circulation around 6Z. Figure 2 shows all the observations accepted into the analysis. There are ERS1 wind vectors crossing the center of the circulation, and the assimilation system accepted the data. The vectors closest the center are likely contaminated by precipitation, and should have been rejected. At this point, it's not clear how often this kind of problem occurs, or what might be done to detect and reject the bad data. It's under investigation.
An important point for reanalysis users, especially as resolutions are increased to better resolve weather and smaller scale circulations, is that reanalyses are assimilating vast quantities of observations. sometimes poor quality data does make it into the analyses. While quality of data and analyses are improving, users still need to consider that features may or may not be realistic. Likewise, we are providing some information on the accepted observations in MERRA. More difficult is providing access to the users on the actual observations.

Figure 2. MERRA analysis sea level pressure, analysis streamlines and windbarbs showing the accepted observations (red is buoy or ship, black is ERS1). Most of the ERS1 vectors seem to agree with the mass field, however, close to the center of the low pressure the ERS1 vectors are crossing the isobars. The wind analysis is drawing to the observations, even when they disagree with the mass field.

Initial Data Available

This is a short note to inform you that the first years of data have been opened for access at the Modeling and Assimilation Data and Information Services Center (MDISC). The announcement can be found here: http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/merra/data_access.php

Instructions for download and visualization are available at: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/MDISC/

Documentation and status of the system and data files are at the MERRA WWW page: http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/merra/

While there are a number of tools for access, to download large amounts, probably the most straightforward way is to follow the links through Mirador (a search and order program). This will provide a script that will ftp the data back to the user. Alternately, Mirador can provide pointers to the ftp location of the data, which can also be copied with "wget".

Keep in mind that the data is not yet a complete time series. Links to production status are provided above. However, there is a lag between production and data availability at MDISC required for quality checking of the data files.

If you do download data, please be sure to sign up to the MERRA news listserv at the MDISC site. As issues related to the scientific understanding of the data and system become known, we will make every effort to communicate this information to users. The listserv is the most direct way to contact users.

We are also forming a FAQ list and citation lists. The content of these are directly related to users providing information back to the GMAO.