NOAA and NASA have joined in a collaborative project aimed at developing a shared scientific, technological, and application vision for the future of US reanalysis efforts. NASA’s Earth Science Program; the Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction (MAP); NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Program Office (WPO); and NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) have jointly contributed to fund this project since FY 2022. The end goal of this multi-agency effort is to reduce the cost of reanalysis R & D by developing a joint framework for experimentation, including joint observational database and joint framework for diagnostics as shown in the schematic below.
The task deliverables include the (i) development of a cloud-based, publicly open database for reanalysis input coverage of observational data for the large portion of the satellite era (from early 1990s to present), (ii) reanalysis inputs for a coupled atmospheric, oceanic, ice, and land (snow) reanalysis, (iii) creation of a separate repository for restricted data that will only be available to centers with proper access clearance if some observations are not available for public release and (iv) collaboration with NASA to reconcile observational data holdings between NOAA and NASA, to develop QC, tools for managing shared database and sharing of the reanalysis output, and common tools for diagnostics of the reanalysis quality.
The joint project has made progress based on the 2023 Q4 report by creating a shared, open input database from 1979 to present with better inventory to merge the joint NOAA/NASA holdings in a public cloud archive on AWS (see Figure 1). Also, progress has been made in the development of the joint data diagnostics for sharing the reanalysis output in the observational space, stress testing of the framework with NOAA coupled data assimilation & reanalysis scout and replay runs at 1-degree for 40 years. The researchers from NOAA Physical Science Laboratory (PSL), Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) contribute to this collaborative project.
