Evaluation of the Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) Global Water and Energy Budgets

The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalyses has completed 27 years of data, soon to be caught up to present. Here, we present an 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, but that the magnitude of energy imbalance in the system is improved with more observations. 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).