Franklin R. Robertson

TL;DR: The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) was undertaken by NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office with two primary objectives: to place observations from NASA's Earth Observing System satellites into a climate context and to improve upon the hydrologic cycle represented in earlier generations of reanalyses as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, five reanalyses precipitation fields are compared with two observed data products to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the re-analyses relative to the reference dataset, and Taylor diagrams show the skill of re-analysis relative to a reference dataset while there is a general sense that the rean analyses precipitation data are improving in recent systems.

TL;DR: New evidence is presented that the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) tropical radiative energy budget is much more dynamic and variable than previously thought and the results indicate that the radiation budget changes are caused by changes in tropical mean cloudiness.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluate the latest NASA reanalysis, called the Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA), from a global water and energy cycles perspective.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors quantified mean annual and monthly fluxes of Earth's water cycle over continents and ocean basins during the first decade of the millennium, using satellite measurements first and data-integrating models second.