Brief communication: Interest of a regional climate model against ERA5 to simulate the near-surface climate of the Greenland ice sheet

The ERA5 reanalysis, recently made available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a new reanalysis product at a higher resolution which will replace ERA-Interim, considered to be the best reanalysis over Greenland until now. However, so far very little is known about...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Delhasse, Alison, Kittel, Christoph, Amory, Charles, Hofer, Stefan, Fettweis, Xavier
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2019-96
https://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/tc-2019-96/
Description
Summary:The ERA5 reanalysis, recently made available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a new reanalysis product at a higher resolution which will replace ERA-Interim, considered to be the best reanalysis over Greenland until now. However, so far very little is known about the performance of ERA5 when compared to ERA-Interim over the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). This study shows (1) that ERA5 improves not significantly the ERA-Interim comparison with near-surface climate observations over GrIS, (2) polar regional climate models (e.g. MAR) are still a useful tool to study the GrIS climate compared to ERA5, in particular in summer, and (3) that MAR results are not sensitive to the forcing used at its lateral boundaries (ERA5 or ERA-Interim).