An assessment of tropopause characteristics of the ERA5 and ERA-Interim meteorological reanalyses

Hoffmann, Lars; Spang, Reinhold

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-4019-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-4019-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

The SPARC Reanalysis Intercomparison Project (S-RIP) (ACP/ESSD...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-4019-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 6

Research article

|

28 Mar 2022

Research article |

| 28 Mar 2022

An assessment of tropopause characteristics of the ERA5 and ERA-Interim meteorological reanalyses

Lars Hoffmann and Reinhold Spang

Data sets

Reanalysis Tropopause Data Repository Lars Hoffmann and Reinhold Spang https://doi.org/10.26165/JUELICH-DATA/UBNGI2

ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) ECMWF https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5

ECMWF Reanalysis - Interim (ERA-Interim) ECMWF https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-interim

COSMIC Data Analysis and Archive Center CDAAC https://cdaac-www.cosmic.ucar.edu/cdaac/

US High Vertical Resolution Radiosonde Data SPARC https://www.sparc-climate.org/data-centre/data-access/us-radiosonde/

Short summary

We present an intercomparison of 2009–2018 lapse rate tropopause characteristics as derived from ECMWF's ERA5 and ERA-Interim reanalyses. Large-scale features are similar, but ERA5 shows notably larger variability, which we mainly attribute to UTLS temperature fluctuations due to gravity waves being better resolved by ECMWF's IFS forecast model. Following evaluation with radiosondes and GPS data, we conclude ERA5 will be a more suitable asset for tropopause-related studies in future work.