The Land Analysis for the NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis

Over the past several years, the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) of the U.S. National Weather Service has developed a Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS). This NCEP GLDAS infrastructure has been included in the development of NCEP's Climate Forecast System Reanalysis project (CFSR) as its land surface analysis component. This land surface analysis will be used as initial conditions for the newly developed NCEP CFS. Compared to the previous two generations of NCEP global reanalysis, the hallmark of this CFSR GLDAS is the use of observed global precipitation analyses as forcing of the Noah land surface model to derive the land surface analysis, rather than the typical reanalysis approach of using precipitation from the assimilating background atmospheric model. In this study we will demonstrate the global soil moisture climatology and anomalies in CFSR. We will also compare the CFSR soil moisture with other soil moisture products of NCEP including the Global Reanalysis II (GR2), the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS), and the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). This study should provide important information on the similarity and differences between the CFSR soil moisture and the others, as well as the cause of the differences.