An Assimilated Dataset for Earth Science Applications

Abstract

The Data Assimilation Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is currently producing a multiyear gridded global atmospheric dataset for use in climate research, including tropospheric chemistry applications. The data, which are being made available to the scientific community, are well suited for climate research since they are produced by a fixed assimilation system designed to minimize the spinup in the hydrological cycle. By using a nonvarying system, the variability due to algorithm change is eliminated and geophysical variability can be more confidently isolated. The analysis incorporates rawinsonde reports, satellite retrievals of geopotential thickness, cloud-motion winds, and aircraft, ship, and rocketsonde reports. At the lower boundary, the assimilating atmospheric general circulation model is constrained by the observed sea surface temperature and soil moisture derived from observed surface air temperature and precipitation fields. The available output data include all prognostic variables and a large number of diagnostic quantities such as heating rates, precipitation, surface fluxes, cloud fraction, and the height of the planetary boundary layer. These variables were chosen to assure a complete budget of the energy and moisture cycles. The assimilated data should also be useful for estimating transport by cumulus processes. The analysis increments (observation minus first guess) and the estimated analysis errors are provided to help the user assess the quality of the data. All quantities are made available every 6 h at the full resolution of the assimilating general circulation model. Selected surface quantities are made available every 3 h.