Abstract
Abstract. ERA-Interim/Land is a global land surface reanalysis data set covering the period 1979–2010. It describes the evolution of soil moisture, soil temperature and snowpack. ERA-Interim/Land is the result of a single 32-year simulation with the latest ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) land surface model driven by meteorological forcing from the ERA-Interim atmospheric reanalysis and precipitation adjustments based on monthly GPCP v2.1 (Global Precipitation Climatology Project). The horizontal resolution is about 80 km and the time frequency is 3-hourly. ERA-Interim/Land includes a number of parameterization improvements in the land surface scheme with respect to the original ERA-Interim data set, which makes it more suitable for climate studies involving land water resources. The quality of ERA-Interim/Land is assessed by comparing with ground-based and remote sensing observations. In particular, estimates of soil moisture, snow depth, surface albedo, turbulent latent and sensible fluxes, and river discharges are verified against a large number of site measurements. ERA-Interim/Land provides a global integrated and coherent estimate of soil moisture and snow water equivalent, which can also be used for the initialization of numerical weather prediction and climate models.
Highlights
Multimodel land surface simulations, such as those performed within the Global Soil Wetness Project (Dirmeyer, 2011; Dirmeyer et al, 2002, 2006), combined with seasonal forecasting systems have been crucial in triggering advances in land-related predictability as documented in the Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiments (Koster et al, 2006, 2009, 2011)
The median of soil moisture (SM) and snow water equivalent (SWE) are both expressed in millimetres of water or equivalently in kilograms per square metre
The median is of particular interest to illustrate the snow and soil moisture global climatology maps because it indicates “typical” values and a single exceptional year would leave the median invariant
Summary
Multimodel land surface simulations, such as those performed within the Global Soil Wetness Project (Dirmeyer, 2011; Dirmeyer et al, 2002, 2006), combined with seasonal forecasting systems have been crucial in triggering advances in land-related predictability as documented in the Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiments (Koster et al, 2006, 2009, 2011). In recent years several improved global atmospheric reanalyses of the satellite era from 1979 onwards have been produced that enable new applications of offline land surface simulations These include ECMWF’s (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) Interim reanalysis (ERA-Interim; Dee et al, 2011) and NASA’s Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA; Rienecker et al, 2011). Balsamo et al (2010a) evaluated the suitability of ERA-Interim precipitation estimates for land applications at various timescales from daily to annual over the conterminous US They proposed a scale-selective rescaling method to address remaining biases based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Project monthly precipitation data (GPCP; Huffman et al, 2009).
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