CRTF Telecon - 04-30-2014

Meeting notes from L. Yu:

1) Gil introduced and chaired the telecon. He overviewed the agenda, and stressed the need for project description page reviews to get to know what the other groups are doing and to develop opportunities for in-house collaborations.  A project page that describes the work plan and activities has been posted by each group at reanalysis.org. Five projects were reviewed, and the remaining two projects will be presented in the next telecon (May 28, 2014).

2) Each project was given three minutes to present. 

G. Compo presented a summary review of the ozone project on “Improving the Prognostic Ozone Parameterization in the NCEP GFS and CFS for Climate Reanalysis and Operational Forecasts”. The project activities aim to make the ozone parameterization in the GFS aware of time-varying atmospheric constituents before and after CFCs and improve the use of additional terms in the parameterization. Initial progress has been made in examining existing parameterization formulation and devising strategy to meet project goals. A link to a previous presentation can be found at the bottom of the project page.

A. Kumar introduced the group’s research towards the next generation of NOAA climate reanalyses. He outlined the project objective, which is to draw upon the experience and skills from the present reanalyses to build a new framework for atmospheric reanalyses back to 1850 that improve upon the previous generation of NOAA reanalyses. J. Woollen provided a detailed review on their recent progress on transitioning to a hybrid EnKF data assimilation system. Comparison between the new hybrid EnKF with the 3DVAR, CFSR, and ERA-interim was discussed. Links to the previous presentations given by the group members can be found at the bottom of his project webpage.

L. Yu provided a review of the project on evaluating CFSR Air-Sea Heat, Freshwater, and Momentum Fluxes in the context of the Global Energy and Freshwater Budgets. The project aims to identify the strength and weakness of the CFSR surface flux components by comparison with in situ flux measurement, satellite-based analyses and other reanalyses products and understand the sources of biases. A recent activity in using ocean temperature observations in the western Pacific warm pool to check the physical consistency of 12 surface flux products was presented.

M. Ek provided a summary review of the project on “Improving the land-surface components of Climate Forecast System Reanalysis”. He overviewed the recent progress made in improving (i) the resolution of forcing datasets,  (ii) assimilation for snow covered areas, and (iii) down scaling techniques for forcing datasets. 

X. Dong presented a summary review of their project, entitled “Diagnosing and quantifying uncertainties of the reanalyzed clouds, precipitation and radiation budgets over the Arctic and SGP using combined surface-satellite observations”. He outlined the project objectives and overviewed the list of tasks and the datasets used for the project. Links to his previous presentations can be found at the bottom of his project webpage.

3) Gil led open discussions. 

 

-    Meeting coordination

Action: add to the home page the links to the meeting calendars of GEWEX and CLIVAR, and the link to the 2015 AMS conference (W. Chong and Mike Ek was tasked). Anyone can add to the page at https://reanalyses.org/task-forces/national-international-meetings

-     International projects coordination

Action: invite JRA-55 to give a presentation at the upcoming telecons. 

-    J. Carton suggested a telecon to highlight ocean reanalysis work at various institutions ... (Jim, please elaborate)

-    D. Barrie reminded the task force members that the annual project progress report is due by the end of May.

-    Gil pointed out that the NCRTF telecon calendar is scheduled up to July 2014 and solicited opinions for the future dates. The general consensus was to break inJuly and August and resume the normal schedule in September.

-    M. Ek will be the rapporteur for the May 28, 2014 telecon.