I gave a short talk at the weekly Energy Institute seminar on 21st March 2018 in UCD. My presentation was titled “Shortwave Radiation in Reanalyses: Skill Scores and Spatial Patterns”. I briefly discussed my ongoing research surrounding the use of reanalysis datasets as a representation of past climatology for shortwave radiation (SW) in Ireland. I presented results on the accuracy of three reanalyses; MERRA2, ERA-Interim and MÉRA, in estimating daily mean temperature and daily total SW compared to station observations using standard skill scores.
I then talked about how postprocessing can provide improvements to these reanalysis skill scores for SW. We found large improvements in mean error and RMSE even with a simple adaptive linear least squares method.
I also presented initial results on the SW spatial patterns seen around Ireland in each of the three reanalyses. The interesting east-west variation in SW highlighted by the land-sea contrast seen in observations (satellite) is captured well by MÉRA and ERA-interim and it is less pronounced in MERRA2.