During the last decades, reanalysis of past meteorological observations using modern data assimilation technique and restructure the long-term and consistent gridded data products have been made great progress. Such datasets provide us the most primary research tools to identify the state and evolution of atmosphere, and understand the climate change and variability at different spatial-temporal scales. In this paper, the current research status and advances in the global reanalysis datasets including some of international global atmosphere reanalysis projects and the corresponding reanalyzed products, the important applications of reanalyzed products in some research fields of the atmospheric science, the validation and evaluation of the reanalysis datasets，and some quality problems represented by the reanalyzed products in climate change studies are systematically reviewed. Moreover，the prospects of the studies on atmospheric reanalysis in the future are also discussed in this paper.