East Asia Reanalysis System (EARS)

Abstract. Reanalysis data plays a vital role in weather and climate study, as well as meteorological resource development and application. In this work, the East Asia Reanalysis System (EARS) was developed using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolations (GSI) data assimilation system. The regional reanalysis system is forced by the European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) global reanalysis EAR-Interim data at 6-h intervals; and hourly surface observations are assimilated by the Four-Dimension Data Assimilation (FDDA) scheme during the WRF model integration; upper observations are assimilated in a three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3D-VAR) mode at analysis moment. It should be highlighted that many of the assimilated observations have not been used in other reanalysis systems. The reanalysis runs from 1980 to 2018, producing a regional reanalysis dataset covering East Asia and surrounding areas at 12-km horizontal resolution, 74 sigma levels, and 3-hour intervals. Finally, an evaluation of EARS has been performed with the respect to the root mean square error (RMSE), based on the 10-year (2008–2017) observational data. Compared to the global reanalysis data of the EAR-Interim, the regional reanalysis data of the EARS are closer to the observations in terms of RMSE in both surface and upper-level fields. The present study provides evidence for substantial improvements seen in EARS compared to the ERA-Interim reanalysis fields over East Asia. The study also demonstrates the potential use of the EARS data for applications over East Asia and proposes further plans to provide the latest reanalysis in real-time operation mode. Simple data and updated information are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7404918 (Yin et al., 2022), and the full datasets are publicly accessible on the Data-as-a-Service platform of China Meteorological Administration (CMA) at http://data.cma.cn.