Summary

Description

The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) was initially completed for the 31-year period from 1979 to 2009, in January 2010. The CFSR was designed and executed as a global, high resolution, coupled atmosphere-ocean-land surface-sea ice system to provide the best estimate of the state of these coupled domains over this 31-year period. The CFSR has also been extended as an operational, real time product into the future. New features of the CFSR include: (1) coupling of atmosphere and ocean during the generation of the 6 hour guess field; (2) an interactive sea-ice model; and (3) assimilation of satellite radiances by the Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) scheme over the entire period. The CFSR global atmosphere resolution is approximately 38 km (T382) with 64 levels extending from the surface to 0.26 hPa. The global ocean's latitudinal spacing is 0.25 deg at the equator, extending to a global 0.5 deg beyond the tropics, with 40 levels to a depth of 4737m. The global land surface model has four4 soil levels and the global sea ice model has 3 layers. The CFSR atmospheric model has observed variations in carbon dioxide (CO2) over the 1979-2009 period, together with changes in aerosols and other trace gases and solar variations. Most available in-situ and satellite observation data were included in the CFSR. Satellite-based radiance observations were bias corrected with spin-up runs at full resolution, taking into account variable CO2 concentrations. This procedure enabled smooth transitions of the observation record due to evolutionary changes in satellite observing systems. The CFSR atmospheric, oceanic and land surface output products are available at an hourly time resolution and at a 0.5 deg x 0.5 deg latitude and longitude resolution. In total, there are 10 data products available from the National Climatic Data Center that make up the CFS Reanalysis collection: MON - Monthly Means; TIME - Parameter Timeseries; PGB - 3-D Pressure Level Data; FLX - Surface and Radiative Fluxes; OCN - 3-D Ocean Data; IPV - 3-D Isentropic Level Data; DIAB - 3-D Diabatic Heating Data; GRBLOW - Low-Resolution Data; HIC - High-Res Initial Conditions; LIC - Low-Res Initial Conditions. All data are in GRIB-2 format, except for the initial condition data which are in native binary formats. Total CFSR data volume is approximately 200 TB.