Oct 19, 2021
Description This repository contains a high resolution regional reanalysis data set of desert dust aerosols. It covers Northern Africa, the Middle East and Europe along with the Mediterranean sea and parts of Central Asia, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between 2007 and 2016 at the horizontal resolution of 0.1° latitude × 0.1° longitude in rotated grid, and at the temporal resolution of 3 hours.
This data set consists of upper air (dust mass concentrations and extinction coefficient), surface (dust deposition and solar irradiance fields, among them) and total column (e.g., dust optical depth and load) variables. Some dust variables, such as concentrations and wet and dry deposition, are expressed for a binned size distribution that ranges from 0.2 to 20 μm in particle diameter. Both analysis and first-guess (analysis-initialized simulation) fields are available for the variables that are diagnosed from the state vector. A set of ensemble statistics is archived for each output variable, namely the ensemble mean, standard deviation, maximum and median.
The data set (78 TB in size) is structured into individual NetCDF files per geophysical variable and type of ensemble statistics. Each individual file covers the time period of one assimilation window (24 hours) and contains 8 time steps at a 3-hourly time-frequency starting at 3 UTC. The files are organized into folders, where each folder contains the files relative to the whole reanalysis period (10 years) for a given variable and type of statistics. Folders in the repository are named with $varname-$stats[_an], while each file is named with $varname_YYYYMMDDHH_$stats[_an].nc, where $varname is the short name of the variable, $stats can take values among av, max, median, std indicating, respectively, the ensemble mean, max, median, the standard deviation for that variable, the optional label _an is present for the variables for which an analysis field is produced, YYYYMMDDHH is the initial date and time of the data included in the NetCDF file. When available, the analysis field is the recommended output for that variable.
This reanalysis was produced using the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) data assimilation in the Multiscale Online Non-hydrostatic AtmospheRe Chemistry model (MONARCH) developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Further information on the reanalysis production and validation can be find in the following description paper: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2021-358/. Please refer to this paper when using the data set in a scientific paper or other documents.
How to cite the description paper Di Tomaso, E., Escribano, J., Basart, S., Ginoux, P., Macchia, F., Barnaba, F., Benincasa, F., Bretonnière, P.-A., Buñuel, A., Castrillo, M., Cuevas, E., Formenti, P., Gonçalves, M., Jorba, O., Klose, M., Mona, L., Montané Pinto, G., Mytilinaios, M., Obiso, V., Olid, M., Schutgens, N., Votsis, A., Werner, E., and Pérez García-Pando, C.: The MONARCH high-resolution reanalysis of desert dust aerosol over Northern Africa, the Middle East and Europe (2007–2016), Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-358, in review, 2021.
