MERRA-2: Hourly Vertically Integrated Water and Energy Diagnostics

M2T1NXINT is an hourly time-averaged 2-dimensional data collection from NASA's MERRA-2 global atmospheric reanalysis. The dataset provides vertically integrated diagnostics of water and energy, covering the period from 1980 to the present with a latency of approximately three weeks after each month. It is produced by NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model version 5.12.4.

Use Cases

• Modeling autoconversion loss of cloud water based on the vertically integrated diagnostics.
• Analyzing convective sources of cloud ice based on the water diagnostics.
• Studying eastward and northward fluxes of atmospheric ice, liquid, and vapor.
• Calculating total potential energy tendencies from the integrated diagnostics.
• Assessing vertically integrated kinetic energy tendencies for climate research.

Strengths

• Provides hourly time-averaged data with timestamps at the central hour (e.g., 00:30 UTC).
• Covers a long temporal range from 1980 to the present.
• Is produced by NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, an authoritative source.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data reprocessing has occurred, and reprocessed filenames differ from originals.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Assimilated reanalysis produced by the Goddard Earth Observing System Model.

Time Range

1980-present

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 00:30:04.847889; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global, at 0.625 x 0.5 degree resolution