Refined global atmospheric energy budget from ERA5

Climate change is accelerating, and its implications are getting more severe every year. As the exchange of energy within the climate system plays a major role during this time, it becomes pivotal to track anomalous energy transports. A precise quantification of Earth's energy balance is thus indispensable in order to understand the way climate is changing. 

We report the publication of a novel dataset providing mass-consistent global atmospheric energy and moisture budget terms for the period 1979-2020. The dataset is derived from 1-hourly analyzed state quantities of the fifth major global reanalysis produced by ECMWF using advanced numerical and diagnostic methods. It provides monthly averages of vertically integrated atmospheric water vapour and moist static plus kinetic energy transports on a 0.25° regular grid. The fields are much less noisy than similar quantities from standard ERA5 postprocessing, although they have been calculated at full horizontal resolution (T639). They show sharp gradients along coastal lines and sea-ice edges making them well suited for regional studies. Other possible applications of this dataset are, e.g., the assessment of global atmospheric energy and moisture budgets, evaluation of ocean-to-land energy and moisture transports, and meridional atmospheric energy transports. Furthermore, various surface flux terms can be estimated indirectly, such as freshwater fluxes or net heat fluxes when combined with state of the art top-of-the-atmosphere products such as CERES-EBAF. This dataset is publicly available via the Copernicus Climate Data Store (see "Refined atmospheric energy budget from ERA5").