We have started to put together a list of frequently asked questions regarding MERRA. Obviously, it will grow with the frequency of questions. Comments or questions posted here will also contribute to the list.
http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/merra/faq.php
All three streams have been running, though there was some down time on the supercomputer last night. So far:
All three MERRA streams are running. Stream 1 has just finished Jan1979, so we'll be evaluating that tomorrow. Streams 2 and three are still in their final spin up period, but will be finished with the spin up by tomorrow.
We have a link to an image that is regularly updated and shows how much data of each stream has been produced, as well as how much data is left to produce.
http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/operations/merra_status_production.gif
Needless to say, at this point we have much more to do.
All the updates are checked in and Stream 1 (starting 1979) has restarted. Streams 2 and 3 should also start soon.
Since the last post, we found that the coefficient update being implemented (and a required fix) also affected the MSU data for TIROS-N which is the only satellite data in early 1979. Since this is a non-zero difference, we need to rewind the 1979 MERRA stream (it had progressed to the start of NOAA-6, July 1, 1979) and rerun.
While testing the updated coefficients, some zero-difference updates to the output diagnostics were incorporated to the system. The updated tag is being handed back to operations, who should be able to restart Stream 1 (1979) before the end of this week. In looking at the first 6 months of the 1979 that is being rerun, the output seems much as we expected from validation experiments.
We still have some backlog in the computing queues for other projects, and we are going to rerun our 2006 validation experiment with the updated coefficients as a formal validation of the implementation of this update. It is important to not that the model physics and generally the data assimilation has not changed in some time, and the bug fix to these coefficients are part of the input data stream.
