Within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ECMWF is producing the ERA5 reanalysis which, once completed, will embody a detailed record of the global atmosphere, land surface and ocean waves from 1950 onwards. This new reanalysis replaces the ERA‐Interim reanalysis (spanning 1979 onwards) which was started in 2006. ERA5 is based on the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) Cy41r2 which was operational in 2016. ERA5 thus benefits from a decade of developments in model physics, core dynamics and data assimilation. In addition to a significantly enhanced horizontal resolution of 31 km, compared to 80 km for ERA‐Interim, ERA5 has hourly output throughout, and an uncertainty estimate from an ensemble (3‐hourly at half the horizontal resolution). This paper describes the general set‐up of ERA5, as well as a basic evaluation of characteristics and performance, with a focus on the dataset from 1979 onwards which is currently publicly available. Re‐forecasts from ERA5 analyses show a gain of up to one day in skill with respect to ERA‐Interim. Comparison with radiosonde and PILOT data prior to assimilation shows an improved fit for temperature, wind and humidity in the troposphere, but not the stratosphere. A comparison with independent buoy data shows a much improved fit for ocean wave height. The uncertainty estimate reflects the evolution of the observing systems used in ERA5. The enhanced temporal and spatial resolution allows for a detailed evolution of weather systems. For precipitation, global‐mean correlation with monthly‐mean GPCP data is increased from 67% to 77%. In general, low‐frequency variability is found to be well represented and from 10 hPa downwards general patterns of anomalies in temperature match those from the ERA‐Interim, MERRA‐2 and JRA‐55 reanalyses.

Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to the present, with continuous updates to support land monitoring applications. ERA5-Land describes the evolution of the water and energy cycles over land in a consistent manner over the production period, which, among others, could be used to analyse trends and anomalies. This is achieved through global high-resolution numerical integrations of the ECMWF land surface model driven by the downscaled meteorological forcing from the ERA5 climate reanalysis, including an elevation correction for the thermodynamic near-surface state. ERA5-Land shares with ERA5 most of the parameterizations that guarantees the use of the state-of-the-art land surface modelling applied to numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. A main advantage of ERA5-Land compared to ERA5 and the older ERA-Interim is the horizontal resolution, which is enhanced globally to 9 km compared to 31 km (ERA5) or 80 km (ERA-Interim), whereas the temporal resolution is hourly as in ERA5. Evaluation against independent in situ observations and global model or satellite-based reference datasets shows the added value of ERA5-Land in the description of the hydrological cycle, in particular with enhanced soil moisture and lake description, and an overall better agreement of river discharge estimations with available observations. However, ERA5-Land snow depth fields present a mixed performance when compared to those of ERA5, depending on geographical location and altitude. The description of the energy cycle shows comparable results with ERA5. Nevertheless, ERA5-Land reduces the global averaged root mean square error of the skin temperature, taking as reference MODIS data, mainly due to the contribution of coastal points where spatial resolution is important. Since January 2020, the ERA5-Land period available has extended from January 1981 to the near present, with a 2- to 3-month delay with respect to real time. The segment prior to 1981 is in production, aiming for a release of the whole dataset in summer/autumn 2021. The high spatial and temporal resolution of ERA5-Land, its extended period, and the consistency of the fields produced makes it a valuable dataset to support hydrological studies, to initialize NWP and climate models, and to support diverse applications dealing with water resource, land, and environmental management. The full ERA5-Land hourly (Muñoz-Sabater, 2019a) and monthly (Muñoz-Sabater, 2019b) averaged datasets presented in this paper are available through the C3S Climate Data Store at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac and https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.68d2bb30, respectively.

The extension of the ERA5 reanalysis back to 1950 supplements the previously published segment covering 1979 to the present. It features the assimilation of additional conventional observations, as well as improved use of early satellite data. The number of observations assimilated increases from 53,000 per day in early 1950 to 570,000 per day by the end of 1978. Accordingly, the quality of the reanalysis improves throughout the period, generally joining seamlessly with the segment covering 1979 to the present. The fidelity of the extension is illustrated by the accurate depiction of the North Sea storm of 1953, and the events leading to the first discovery of sudden stratospheric warmings in 1952. Time series of ERA5 global surface temperature anomalies show temperatures to be relatively stable from 1950 until the late 1970s, in agreement with the other contemporary full‐input reanalysis covering this period and with independent data sets, although there are significant differences in the accuracy of representing specific regions, Europe being well represented in the early period but Australia less so. The variability of ERA5 precipitation from month to month agrees well with observations for all continents, with correlations above 90% for most of Europe and generally in excess of 70% for North America, Asia and Australia. The evolution of upper air temperatures, humidities and winds shows smoothly varying behaviour, including tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling, modulated by volcanic eruptions. The Quasi‐Biennial Oscillation is well represented throughout. Aspects to be improved upon in future reanalyses include the assimilation of tropical cyclone data, the spin‐up of soil moisture and stratospheric humidity, and the representation of surface temperatures over Australia.

The WFDE5 dataset has been generated using the WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) methodology applied to surface meteorological variables from the ERA5 reanalysis. The WFDEI dataset had previously been generated by applying the WFD methodology to ERA-Interim. The WFDE5 is provided at 0.5^∘ spatial resolution but has higher temporal resolution (hourly) compared to WFDEI (3-hourly). It also has higher spatial variability since it was generated by aggregation of the higher-resolution ERA5 rather than by interpolation of the lower-resolution ERA-Interim data. Evaluation against meteorological observations at 13 globally distributed FLUXNET2015 sites shows that, on average, WFDE5 has lower mean absolute error and higher correlation than WFDEI for all variables. Bias-adjusted monthly precipitation totals of WFDE5 result in more plausible global hydrological water balance components when analysed in an uncalibrated hydrological model (WaterGAP) than with the use of raw ERA5 data for model forcing. The dataset, which can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.20d54e34 (C3S, 2020 b), is distributed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) through its Climate Data Store (CDS, C3S, 2020 a) and currently spans from the start of January 1979 to the end of 2018. The dataset has been produced using a number of CDS Toolbox applications, whose source code is available with the data – allowing users to regenerate part of the dataset or apply the same approach to other data. Future updates are expected spanning from 1950 to the most recent year. A sample of the complete dataset, which covers the whole of the year 2016, is accessible without registration to the CDS at https://doi.org/10.21957/935p-cj60 (Cucchi et al., 2020).

We provide a description and concise evaluation of the European Centre of Medium‐range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis v.5 (ERA5) global reanalysis from an additional extension back to 1940 that was released in March 2023, including its timely updates to the end of 2022. The ERA5 product from 1979 to end 2020 and a preliminary back extension from 1950 to 1978 have already been described elsewhere. The new back extension that spans 1940 to 1978 represents the official release and supersedes the preliminary product. Currently, the ERA5 data record extends over more than 83 years of hourly global three‐dimensional fields for many quantities that describe the global atmosphere, land surface, and ocean waves at a horizontal resolution of about 31 km. ERA5 relies on the ingestion of sub‐daily in‐situ and satellite observations, and the number of these increases from 17,000 per day in 1940 to 25 million per day by 2022. Accordingly, the quality of the reanalysis improves throughout the period. Over the Northern Hemisphere ERA5 generally provides a reliable representation of the synoptic situation from the early 1940s and provides long‐term variability that is in line with other datasets. Over the Southern Hemisphere, however, for the early period the description of ERA5 seems mainly statistical. Furthermore, there is a small deviation in surface temperature compared with reconstructions based on monthly aggregations of observations over land before 1946. For this period, the absence of upper air temperature observations reveals a model cold bias in the lower stratosphere. For the period from 1950 to 1978, the final release described here improves on the suboptimal treatment of International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship observations in the preliminary release, with, as a result, a much more homogeneous representation of tropical cyclones over the entire ERA5 record. Longer spin‐up periods also have a beneficial impact on soil moisture.

This article describes the evaluation of a C-band geophysical model function called C-band model 5.N (CMOD5.N). It is used to provide an empirical relation between backscatter as sensed by the spaceborne European Remote Sensing Satellite-2 (ERS-2) and Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) scatterometers and equivalent neutral ocean vector wind at 10-m height (neutral surface wind) as function of scatterometer incidence angle. CMOD5.N embodies a refit of CMOD5, a C-band model function, which was previously derived to obtain nonneutral surface wind, in such a way that its 28 tunable coefficients lead, for a given backscatter observation, to an enhancement of 0.7 m s−1 in wind speed. The value of 0.7 m s−1 is chosen to be independent of wind speed and incidence angle, and it incorporates the average difference between neutral and nonneutral wind (∼0.2 m s−1) and for a known bias of CMOD5 (∼0.5 m s−1) when compared to buoy wind data. The quality of the CMOD5.N fit is successfully tested for the Active Microwave Instrument (AMI) scatterometer on ERS-2 and ASCAT instrument on Meteorological Operational-A (MetOp-A) for July 2007 and January 2008. ASCAT and ERS-2 wind speed obtained from CMOD5.N compares well on average with operational neutral wind from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In comparison with nonneutral wind, the local, seasonally dependent biases between scatterometer and ECMWF model are reduced. Besides effects introduced by sea state, orography, and ocean currents, a residual stability-dependent bias between scatterometer and neutral wind remains, which is likely connected to a nonoptimality in the ECMWF boundary layer formalism that is reported in the literature.