Abstract:
Multi-decadal reanalysis datasets have been widely used to study the global terrestrial water and energy cycles. The driving component of the land surface water budget is the incoming precipitation forcing, which was traditionally generated by the atmospheric general circulation model component of the reanalysis system following the assimilation of atmospheric temperature and humidity observations. The recent CFSR and MERRA-2 reanalysis products, however, essentially use precipitation observations from satellites and/or gauges to force the land surface. This presentation first reviews the approach by which the precipitation observations are introduced in MERRA-2, which relies on a mix of (i) model-generated precipitation at high-latitudes, (ii) a pentad, 2.5 degree satellite product from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) over Africa, and (iii) a daily, 0.5 degree, gauge-based CPC precipitation product elsewhere. This approach represents an evolution of the method used in the land-only MERRA-Land reanalysis. Next, the precipitation climatologies and the resulting land surface conditions are evaluated regionally and for the reanalysis time period (1980-present) against available independent observations. MERRA-2 provides generally improved land surface conditions when compared to MERRA, its predecessor. Improvements include enhanced estimates of soil moisture, terrestrial water storage, runoff, screen-level temperature and turbulent fluxes, with MERRA-2 skill metrics generally similar to those of MERRA-Land. But MERRA-2 also suffers from adverse spin-up effects in soil moisture conditions at very high latitudes because of model precipitation bias in this region.