TY - JOUR
T1 - Brief communication: Evaluation of the near-surface climate in ERA5 over the Greenland Ice Sheet
AU - Delhasse, Alison
AU - Kittel, Christoph
AU - Amory, Charles
AU - Hofer, Stefan
AU - van As, DIrk
AU - Fausto, Robert S.
AU - Fettweis, Xavier
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. Data from the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) and the Greenland Analogue Project (GAP) were provided by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) at http://www.promice.dk (last access: 6 March 2020). Thanks are owed to the Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net) for providing meteorological station observations. The GC-Net has been supported by NASA’s Cryospheric Program with additional logistic support by the US-NSF Office of Polar Program. Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor (Ruth Mottram) for their constructive remarks that helped to improve the paper.
Funding Information:
by the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif (CÉCI), funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.FNRS) under grant no. 2.5020.11 and the Tier-1 supercomputer (Zenobe) of the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles infrastructure funded by the Walloon Region under grant agreement no. 1117545. Alison Delhasse is a research fellow from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/3/12
Y1 - 2020/3/12
N2 - The ERA5 reanalysis, recently made available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a new reanalysis product at a high resolution replacing ERA-Interim and is considered to provide the best climate reanalysis over Greenland to date. However, so far little is known about the performance of ERA5 over the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). In this study, we compare the near-surface climate from the new ERA5 reanalysis to ERA-Interim, the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) as well as to a state-of-the-art polar regional climate model (MAR). The results show (1) that ERA5 does not outperform ERA-Interim significantly when compared with near-surface climate observations over GrIS, but ASR better models the near-surface temperature than both ERA reanalyses. (2) Polar regional climate models (e.g., MAR) are still a useful tool to downscale the GrIS climate compared to ERA5, as in particular the near-surface temperature in summer has a key role for representing snow and ice processes such as the surface melt. However, assimilating satellite data and using a more recent radiative scheme enable both ERA and ASR reanalyses to represent more satisfactorily than MAR the downward solar and infrared fluxes. (3) MAR near-surface climate is not affected when forced at its lateral boundaries by either ERA5 or ERA-Interim. Therefore, forcing polar regional climate models with ERA5 starting from 1950 will enable long and homogeneous surface mass balance reconstructions.
AB - The ERA5 reanalysis, recently made available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a new reanalysis product at a high resolution replacing ERA-Interim and is considered to provide the best climate reanalysis over Greenland to date. However, so far little is known about the performance of ERA5 over the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). In this study, we compare the near-surface climate from the new ERA5 reanalysis to ERA-Interim, the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) as well as to a state-of-the-art polar regional climate model (MAR). The results show (1) that ERA5 does not outperform ERA-Interim significantly when compared with near-surface climate observations over GrIS, but ASR better models the near-surface temperature than both ERA reanalyses. (2) Polar regional climate models (e.g., MAR) are still a useful tool to downscale the GrIS climate compared to ERA5, as in particular the near-surface temperature in summer has a key role for representing snow and ice processes such as the surface melt. However, assimilating satellite data and using a more recent radiative scheme enable both ERA and ASR reanalyses to represent more satisfactorily than MAR the downward solar and infrared fluxes. (3) MAR near-surface climate is not affected when forced at its lateral boundaries by either ERA5 or ERA-Interim. Therefore, forcing polar regional climate models with ERA5 starting from 1950 will enable long and homogeneous surface mass balance reconstructions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85082137607&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5194/tc-14-957-2020
DO - 10.5194/tc-14-957-2020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85082137607
SN - 1994-0416
VL - 14
SP - 957
EP - 965
JO - Cryosphere
JF - Cryosphere
IS - 3
ER -