NNJA: Earth System Observations for Reanalysis Comparison, 1979-Present

Observations from 1979 to present are archived in this joint NOAA and NASA dataset to foster collaboration and enable direct comparison of Earth System reanalysis results. The archive contains atmosphere, ice, land, and ocean observations in formats including bufr, ioda, and netcdf, hosted in an AWS S3 bucket. It includes specification of observational errors and a black/white list for historic observations.

Use Cases

• Compare Earth System reanalysis model performance based on a singular observation input dataset.
• Analyze observational errors for specific sensors and sources included in the archive.
• Filter historical observations using the provided black/white list for quality control.
• Access multi-domain (atmosphere, ice, land, ocean) observational data for climate studies.

Strengths

• Data spans from 1979 to present, providing a long-term temporal record.
• Jointly curated by NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory and NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.
• Includes specification of observational errors and a black/white list for quality assessment.

Limitations

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

Provenance

Source

NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory and NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office

Collection Method

Curated joint observation archive, some data reprocessed as appropriate.

Time Range

1979 to present