Identification

Title

Quality of reanalyses in the tropics

Abstract

Broad vertical layer-averaged temperatures from the microwave sounder unit (MSU) are used as a quasi-independent validation of temperature fields from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction-National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP-NCAR) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalyses. While the MSU and NCEP-NCAR temperatures show fairly good agreement overall, large discrepancies with ECMWF temperatures indicate that changes in the satellite observing system may have adversely affected the ECMWF reanalyses, especially in the Tropics. Two spurious discontinuities are present in tropical temperatures with jumps to warmer values throughout the Tropics below 500 mb in late 1986 and early 1989, and further spurious interannual variability is also present. These features are also reflected in the specific humidity fields. The temperature discrepancies have a complex vertical structure with height that is not fully understood, although it seems that the problems partly arise from positive reinforcement of biases in satellite radiances with those of the assimilating model first guess. Changes in the observing system provide a limit to the usefulness of the reanalyses in some climate studies.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d73b61gg

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2001-04-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2001 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC ยง108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license form the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/AMS) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or copyright@ametsoc.org.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact