Homogenizing surface pressure time-series from operational numerical weather prediction models for geodetic applications

Abstract

Global surface pressure grids from 14.5 years of 6-hourly analyses out of both the operational ECMWF weather prediction model and ERA-Interim are mapped to a common reference orography by means of ECMWF's mean sea-level pressure diagnostic. The approach reduces both relative biases and residual variability by about one order of magnitude and thereby achieves a consistency among both data sets at the level of about 1 hPa. Remaining differences rather reflect temperature biases and also resolution limitations of the reanalysis data set, but are not anymore related to the local roughness in orography or to changes in the spatial resolution of the operational model. The presented reduction method therefore allows to obtain surface pressure time series with the long-time consistency of a reanalysis from an operational numerical weather model with much higher resolution and much shorter latency, making the results suitable for geodetic near realtime applications requiring continuously updated time series that are homogeneous over many years.