Evaluating the reliability of air temperature from ERA5 reanalysis data

• Main Authors: McNicholl, Barry, Lee, Yee Hui, Campbell, Abraham G., Dev, Soumyabrata
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Temperature Measurement; Land Surface Temperature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163305
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The reliability of European Remote Sensing 5 (ERA5) satellite-based air temperature data is under investigation in this letter. To evaluate this, the ERA5 data will be compared with land-based data obtained from weather stations on the global historical climatology network (GHCN). Two climate regions are taken into consideration, temperate and tropical. Five years worth of data is collected and compared through box plots, regression models, and statistical metrics. The results show that the satellite temperature performs better in the temperate region than the tropical region. This suggests that the time of year and climate region have an impact on the accuracy of the satellite data as milder temperatures produce better approximations.