The authors evaluated several land surface variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) product that are important for global ecological and hydrological studies, including daily maximum (Lnax) and minimum (Lnin) surface air temperatures, atmosphere vapor pressure deficit (VPD), incident solar radiation (SWrad), and surface soil moisture. The M ERRA...

Improved understanding of the water balance in the Blue Nile is of critical importance because of increasingly frequent hydroclimatic extremes under a changing climate. The intercomparison and evaluation of multiple land surface models (LSMs) associated with different meteorological forcing and precipitation datasets can offer a moderate range of water budget variable estimates. In this context...

The temporal consistency of the moisture fields (precipitation, evaporation and total precipitable water) from five global reanalyses is examined over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean during 1989–2009. This concern is important given that (1) global reanalyses are known to be prone to inhomogeneities and artificial trends caused by changes in the observing system, and (2) the period of study h...

Atmospheric reanalyses depend on a mix of observations and model forecasts. In data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, the reanalysis solution is more dependent on the model structure, assumptions, and data assimilation methods than in data-rich regions. Applications such as the forcing of ice–ocean models are sensitive to the errors in reanalyses. Seven reanalysis datasets for the Arctic regio...

[1] Changes in tropospheric water vapor over the Arctic are examined for the period 1979 to 2010 using humidity and temperature data from nine high latitude radiosonde stations north of 70 N with nearly complete records, and from six atmospheric reanalyses, emphasizing the three most modern efforts, MERRA, CFSR and ERA-Interim. Based on comparisons with the radiosonde profiles, the reanalyses a...