Graphical Abstract

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Kobayashi, S., Y. Ota, Y. Harada, A. Ebita, M. Moriya, H. Onoda, K. Onogi, H. Kamahori, C. Kobayashi, H. Endo, K. Miyaoka, and K. Takahashi, 2015: The JRA-55 Reanalysis: General specifications and basic characteristics. J. Meteor. Soc. Japan, 93, 5-48.
https://doi.org/10.2151/jmsj.2015-001
Graphical Abstract

Highlights:

• The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) conducted the second Japanese global atmospheric reanalysis, called the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis or JRA-55. It covers the period starting in 1958, when regular radiosonde observations began on a global basis. JRA-55 is the first comprehensive reanalysis that has covered the last half-century since the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 45-year Reanalysis (ERA-40), and is the first one to apply four-dimensional variational analysis to this period.
• JRA-55 has been produced with the TL319 version of JMA’s operational data assimilation system as of December 2009, which was extensively improved since the Japanese 25-year Reanalysis (JRA-25). It also uses many newly available and improved past observations. The resulting reanalysis products are considerably better than the JRA-25 product (Fig. 1).
• Two major problems of JRA-25 were a cold bias in the lower stratosphere, which has been diminished, and a dry bias in the Amazon basin, which has been mitigated.
• The temporal consistency of temperature analysis has also been considerably improved compared to previous reanalysis products (Fig. 2).