Global Energy and Water Budgets in MERRA

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Abstract
Reanalyses, retrospectively analyzing observations over climatological time scales, represent a merger between satellite observations and models to provide globally continuous data and have improved over several generations. Balancing the earth’s global water and energy budgets has been a focus of research for more than two decades. Models tend to their own climate while remotely sensed observations have had varying degrees of uncertainty. This study evaluates the latest NASA reanalysis, the Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA), from a global water and energy cycles perspective, to place it in context of previous work and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses.MERRA was configured to provide complete budgets in its output diagnostics, including the incremental analysis update (IAU), the term that represents the observations influence on the analyzed states, alongside the physical flux terms. Precipitation in reanalyses is typically sensitive to the observationa...