MERRA-2: Monthly Diurnal Land Ice Surface Diagnostics

M2TUNXGLC is a 2-dimensional monthly diurnal means data collection from NASA's MERRA-2 global atmospheric reanalysis. It contains assimilated land ice surface diagnostics, such as fractional glaciated snow cover and snow mass, produced by the NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office using the GEOS model. The dataset covers the period from 1980 to the present with a latency of approximately three weeks after the end of each month.

Use Cases

• Modeling snow mass changes over glaciated surfaces based on the snow mass residual due to densification variable.
• Analyzing diurnal patterns of snow cover based on the 3-hourly time-stamped monthly means.
• Studying long-term trends in land ice surface diagnostics from 1980 to the present.
• Integrating assimilated surface diagnostics into broader climate or hydrological models.

Strengths

• Data is produced by NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office using the GEOS 5.12.4 model.
• Coverage spans from 1980 to the present, providing a long-term record.
• Provides monthly diurnal means at 3-hour intervals (e.g., 01:30, 04:30 UTC).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Assimilated data from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) reanalysis.

Time Range

1980-present

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 00:50:56.610928; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global at 0.625 x 0.5 degree resolution