New Results: High Latitude Fluxes

There are a number of presentations that include MERRA data at the Workshop: Surface Fluxes: Challenges for High Latitudes in Boulder CO this week. Given the scarcity of observations at high latitudes and uncertainty in satellite observations, reanalyses may be useful data sets.

Michael Brunke, Xubin Zeng,( Uncertainties in global surface flux datasets in high latitudes.) compare various reanalyses and remote sensing products with tower and ship data from various field experiments (CATCH, FASTEX and SHEBA). The results show MERRA is much more comparable to the station data than the previous generations reanalyses, and in range of the remotely sensed products (e.g. Figure 1). The poster is available online.


Figure 1 Comparison of 6-hourly mean wind stress from MERRA, ERA-40, NCEP-R1, and NCEP-R2. The solid lines are the one-to-one slope and the dashed lines are the straight-line regressions with the regression slopes indicated.

Richard Cullather. Evaluation of Arctic Energy and Moisture Budgets in the MERRA Reanalysis. has also compared MERRA Arctic data with long term station measurements and some field experiment sites. For example, Figure 2 shows the time series of MERRA precipitation compared to observations made at a drift camp site. While there are some discrepancies in the magnitude of a few events, the comparison (and correlations of 0.74) seems quite reasonable given the uncertainties at high latitudes.

Figure 2 Drift Camp observed precipitation compared to MERRA. The points are 7 day running means over the period late 1987 through 1990 (a total of 1200 days).

In addition, there is:
J. Brent Roberts, Franklin R. Robertson, Carol Anne Clayson, Analysis of atmosphere-ocean surface flux feedbacks in recent satellite and model reanalysis products.

More on that later.

Full presentations will be posted online at the workshop site shortly after the conclusion.