Journal
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 39, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051591
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Funding
- DAMOCLES [18509]
- European Commission
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Atmospheric reanalyses were validated against tethersonde sounding data on air temperature, air humidity and wind speed, collected during the drifting ice station Tara in the central Arctic in April-August 2007. The data were not assimilated into the reanalyses, providing a rare possibility for their independent validation, which was here made for the lowermost 890 m layer. The following reanalyses were included in the study: the European ERA-Interim, the Japanese JCDAS, and the U. S. NCEP-CFSR, NCEP-DOE, and NASA-MERRA. All reanalyses included large errors. ERA-Interim was ranked first; it outperformed the other reanalyses in the bias and root-mean-square-error (RMSE) for air temperature as well as in the bias, RMSE, and correlation coefficient for the wind speed. ERA-Interim suffered, however, from a warm bias of up to 2 degrees C in the lowermost 400 m layer and a moist bias of 0.3 to 0.5 g kg(-1) throughout the 890 m layer. The NCEP-CFSR, NCEP-DOE, and NASA-MERRA reanalyses outperformed the other reanalyses with respect to 2-m air temperature and specific humidity and 10-m wind speed, which makes them, especially NCEP-CSFR, better in providing turbulent flux forcing for sea ice models. Considering the whole vertical profile, however, the older NCEP-DOE got the second highest overall ranking, being better than the new NCEP-CFSR. Considering the whole group of reanalyses, the largest air temperature errors surprisingly occurred during higher-than-average wind speeds. The observed biases in temperature, humidity, and wind speed were in many cases comparable or even larger than the climatological trends during the latest decades. Citation: Jakobson, E., T. Vihma, T. Palo, L. Jakobson, H. Keernik, and J. Jaagus (2012), Validation of atmospheric reanalyses over the central Arctic Ocean, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L10802, doi:10.1029/2012GL051591.
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