A Community Resource: reanalyses.org

There have been numerous discussions in meetings over the last year or so regarding the multitude of new reanalyses available. These have been generally concerned with users time and effort in deciding which reanalysis best suits any particular users needs. This is mostly true, though some features of reanalyses are equally well represented. The utility of reanalyses is very broad, and has been the key in there continuing development. However, it is nearly impossible for a developing center to sufficiently document all possible features of a reanalysis in reasonable time to provide access to the community. So, there is some effort incurred, for intercomparisons, to be the first researcher on any given topic utilizing all these reanalyses.

It takes time to document a system, but in time we can characterize well the systems. For MERRA, we have produced documentation, the MERRA Atlas, a www page listing the most recent papers (that we know of) and also this blog. However, there is much much more available. How can communicate collective knowledge about all the reanalysis systems? Consider also that communication in this sense is a two-way street. The users of reanalyses have valuable information as well. Complicating matters, we'd like this information with short turnaround time, minimizing duplicative efforts.

While peer review journals provide the formal record, the explosion of internet tools allows for much more rapid transfer of information. Wikipedia has an entry and definition of reanalysis. But the research community has much more demanding needs for knowledge. Given the problem and difficulty of any solution, we can use the internet for documentaiton of not only the developing centers understanding of the various reanalyses, but also the much more vast user community.

So, reanalyses.org has been set up to provide a place for information and research to be posted more quickly than peer review printing (though, early online release that some journals are adopting is a great positive step). This site is intended to be a forum for all aspects of reanalyses and the two way street we need to keep up on the rapid developments. The site is also an experiment, in a way. Consider that it will only grow and thrive with active participation of developing centers, expert researcher and new users! Have a look around reanalyses.org, and if you have some unique comparison or evaluation to share, request an account and add a link or report!

Publications Page growing

With the holidays, travel and deadlines it has been difficult to put together regular snippets of interesting results. The hope was to summarize the papers coming out but there are quite a few and a lot of useful information. I hope to get back to that in the coming weeks.

In the mean time, it is important to share the information in a timely fashion, and the speed that the internet and electronic publishing permits is much greater now than anytime before. The GMAO is collecting information and manuscripts with permission of the authors on our www site. The MERRA Publications page is growing well, most manuscripts are presently submitted for publication and some already accepted. In addition, while most of the papers are written by GMAO staff, quite a few have been authored outside the GMAO, without a GMAO co-author. Most papers have some critical review of the realism of the system. It is important for the development of the systems to account for the strengths and weaknesses, and is a challenge to improve the system while keeping the processes that are already well represented. Shared knowledge would be critical to this development.

Included on the page is the general overview description of the project: Rienecker, M.M., et al., 2011. MERRA - NASA's Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications. J. Climate (submitted). Check the page linked above for the latest status on the paper. At this time it is still being reviewed.