Ebisuzaki, W. and L. Zhang, 2011: Assessing the performance of the CFSR by an ensemble of analyses. Climate Dynamics, 37, 2541-2550

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-011-1074-5#

The Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR, Saha et al. in Bull Am Meteor Soc 91:1015–1057, 2010) is the latest global reanalysis from the National Centers of Environmental Prediction (NCEP). In this study, we compare the CFSR tropospheric analyses to two ensembles of analyses. The first ensemble consists of 12 h analyses from various operational analyses for the year 2007. This ensemble shows how well the CFSR analyses can capture the daily variability. The second ensemble consists of monthly means from the available reanalyses from the years 1979 to 2009 which is used to examine the trends. With the 2007 ensemble, we find that the CFSR captures the daily variability in 2007 better than the older reanalyses and is comparable to the operational analyses. With the ensemble of monthly means, the CFSR is often the outlier. The CFSR shows a strong warming trend in the tropics which is not seen in the observations or other reanalyses.

The 200 hPa height (m) for Singapore (grid cell average). The time series were low passed filtered by a 12 months running mean. Shown are CFSR (red), ERA-40 (orange), JRA-25 (light blue), MERRA (green), R1 (blue), R2 (black) and the observation (thick black line).