HR: 09:30h
AN: A21B-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Arctic Performance of Recent Atmospheric Reanalyses
AU: * Bromwich, D H
EM: bromwich.1@osu.edu
AU: Wang, S
EM: wang.446@osu.edu
AB: Recent global reanalyses from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ERA-40) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP-2) are compared and contrasted for the region poleward of 50§N during the "modern" satellite era (1979-2002). The focus is on the directly observed atmospheric variables, namely temperature, geopotential height/pressure, moisture, and winds. The question is posed: how well do these reanalyses reproduce on the monthly time scale the observations that were assimilated from rawinsonde stations? A more detailed analysis is conducted for the North American Arctic by also including the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), recently completed by NCEP. Both surface and free atmospheric validation studies are conducted. Notably, the reanalysis predicted precipitation amounts are examined in relation to corrected gauge measurements of monthly precipitation totals. One motivating factor is to examine the added benefit of the precipitation assimilation performed by NARR for at least some parts of the North American Arctic.
DE: 3309 Climatology (1620)
DE: 3349 Polar meteorology
DE: 3364 Synoptic-scale meteorology
DE: 9315 Arctic region
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly