File Specification for the 7-km GEOS-5 Nature Run, Ganymed Release Non-Hydrostatic 7-km Global Mesoscale Simulation

This document describes the gridded output files produced by a two-year global, non-hydrostatic mesoscale simulation for the period 2005-2006 produced with the non-hydrostatic version of GEOS-5 Atmospheric Global Climate Model (AGCM). In addition to standard meteorological parameters (wind, temperature, moisture, surface pressure), this simulation includes 15 aerosol tracers (dust, sea-salt, sulfate, black and organic carbon), O3, CO and CO2. This model simulation is driven by prescribed sea-surface temperature and sea-ice, daily volcanic and biomass burning emissions, as well as high-resolution inventories of anthropogenic sources. A description of the GEOS-5 model configuration used for this simulation can be found in Putman et al. (2014). The simulation is performed at a horizontal resolution of 7 km using a cubed-sphere horizontal grid with 72 vertical levels, extending up to to 0.01 hPa (approximately 80 km). For user convenience, all data products are generated on two logically rectangular longitude-latitude grids: a full-resolution 0.0625 deg grid that approximately matches the native cubed-sphere resolution, and another 0.5 deg reduced-resolution grid. The majority of the full-resolution data products are instantaneous with some fields being time-averaged. The reduced-resolution datasets are mostly time-averaged, with some fields being instantaneous. Hourly data intervals are used for the reduced-resolution datasets, while 30-minute intervals are used for the full-resolution products. All full-resolution output is on the model's native 72-layer hybrid sigma-pressure vertical grid, while the reduced-resolution output is given on native vertical levels and on 48 pressure surfaces extending up to 0.02 hPa. Section 4 presents additional details on horizontal and vertical grids. Information of the model surface representation can be found in Appendix B. The GEOS-5 product is organized into file collections that are described in detail in Appendix C. Additional details about variables listed in this file specification can be found in a separate document, the GEOS-5 File Specification Variable Definition Glossary. Documentation about the current access methods for products described in this document can be found on the GEOS-5 Nature Run portal: http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/projects/G5NR. Information on the scientific quality of this simulation will appear in a forthcoming NASA Technical Report Series on Global Modeling and Data Assimilation to be available from http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/pubs/tm/.