Reanalysis products are widely used to study the land-atmosphere exchanges of energy, water, and carbon fluxes, and have been evaluated using in situ data above or below ground. Here measurements for several years at five flux tower sites in the U.S. (with a total of 315,576 hours of data) are used for the coupled evaluation of both below- and above-ground processes from three global reanalysis products and six global land data assimilation products. All products show systematic errors in precipitation, snow depth, and the timing of the melting and onset of snow. Despite the biases in soil moisture, all products show significant correlations with observed daily soil moisture for the periods with unfrozen soil. While errors in 2 meter air temperature are highly correlated with errors in skin temperature for all sites, the correlations between skin and soil temperature errors are weaker, particularly over the sites with seasonal snow. While net shortwave and longwave radiation flux errors have opposite signs across all products, the net radiation and ground heat flux errors are usually smaller in magnitude than turbulent flux errors. On the other hand, the all-product averages usually agree well with the observations on the evaporative fraction, defined as the ratio of latent heat over the sum of latent and sensible heat fluxes. This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of these widely-used products, and helps understand the connection of their errors in above- versus below-ground quantities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/595636 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Lytle, William |
| Contributors | Zeng, Xubin, Zeng, Xubin, Niu, Guo-Yue, Gupta, Hoshin |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Thesis |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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