Junye Chen

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: 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: By analyzing temporal changes in the frequency of occurrence of emitted thermal and reflected solar fluxes, the effects of El Niño–Southern Oscillation are minimized, and an independent longer-time-scale variation of the radiation budget is identified.

TL;DR: The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalyses have produced several years of data, on the way to a. completing the 1979-present modern satellite era as discussed by the authors.