This report describes the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) global analyses available to NCAR. Several data sets are available with differing characteristics and varying resolutions in both time and space. We assess the internal consistency and accuracy of the ECMWF analyses, document all of the problems we are aware of, describe the analysis system changes and the impacts on the analyses, and determine the usefulness of the ECMWF analyses for climate studies. The purpose of this project is to establish the climate record from global analyses. This record may be used in diagnostic studies of the atmosphere, to compile climatologies which may then be used, among other things, to validate the Community Climate Model, and for examining anomalies such as occur in association with El Nino-Southern Oscillation events. This Technical Note supersedes NCAR Tech. Note 300 which described and evaluated one such data set, that from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) archive. It also presented an eight-year climatology of the circulation statistics for 1000 to 100 mb from that data set.
