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| 4. Externally prescribed boundary conditions and their source | |
| Sea surface temperature | SST and Sea Ice are prescribed from observations; (Bosilovich et al. 2015) |
| Sea-ice | As with SST above, but sea ice albedo is discussed by Cullather et al. (2014) |
| Snow | Observation-based precipitation driving the land surface except in the high latitudes (Reichle et al. 2017a,b) |
| Vegetation | Seasonally-varying climatology of satellite leaf-area index; (Reichle et al. 2017b) |
| Land use (and its evolution in time) | Time invariant satellite land cover; (Reichle et al. 2017b) |
| Aerosols | Emissions (Section 2.2 of Randles et al. 2016); Aerosols are assimilated and interactive with the radiation |
| Green House Gases | Follows RCP 4.5 |
| Solar forcing | NOAA Climate Data Record (CDR) of Solar Spectral Irradiance (SSI), NRLSSI Version 2.1 (Coddington et al. 2017). There is lag in the release of latest data, so the near -real time analysis uses an extrapolation of the solar cycle. |
Additional comments:
| 5. Details of model | |
| Dynamical core (e.g., semi-Lagrangian) | Finite Volume (Putman and Lin, 2007) |
| Grid structure | Cubed sphere (Putman and Lin, 2007) |
| Hydrostatic or nonhydrostatic | Hydrostatic (Putman and Lin, 2007) |
| Radiations parameterization | Chou-Suarez (Molod et al. 2015) |
| Boundary layer parameterization | Molod et al. (2015) |
| Convection parameterization | Molod et al. (2015) |
| Cloud parameterization | Molod et al. (2015) |
| Land surface parameterization | Catchment land surface model (Koster et al. 2000; Reichle et al. 2017b) |
Other relevant details:
| 6. Further information | |
| Operational contact point | Michael Bosilovich, Michael.Bosilovich@nasa.gov |
| URL of the technical note/ reference paper | https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2/docs/ |
| URL for list of products | Bosilovich et al (2016), MERRA-2 File Specification Document https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/pubs/docs/Bosilovich785.pdf |
| DOI details | https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2/citing_MERRA-2/ |
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