The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalyses has produced several years of data, on the way to a completing the 1979-present modern satellite era. Here, we present a preliminary evaluation of those years currently available, including comparisons with the existing long reanalyses (ERA40, JRA25 and NCEP I and II) as well as with global data sets for the water and energy cycle. Time series shows that the MERRA budgets can change with some of the variations in observing systems. We will present all terms of the budgets in MERRA including the time rates of change and analysis increments (tendency due to the analysis of observations).