An Ensemble Adjustment Kalman Filter for Data Assimilation

Abstract

A theory for estimating the probability distribution of the state of a model given a set of observations exists. This nonlinear filtering theory unifies the data assimilation and ensemble generation problem that have been key foci of prediction and predictability research for numerical weather and ocean prediction applications. A new algorithm, referred to as an ensemble adjustment Kalman filter, and the more traditional implementation of the ensemble Kalman filter in which ''perturbed observations'' are used, are derived as Monte Carlo approximations to the nonlinear filter. Both ensemble Kalman filter methods produce assimilations with small ensemble mean errors while providing reasonable measures of uncertainty in the assimilated variables. The ensemble methods can assimilate observations with a nonlinear relation to model state variables and can also use observations to estimate the value of imprecisely known model parameters. These ensemble filter methods are shown to have significant advantages over four-dimensional variational assimilation in low-order models and scale easily to much larger applications. Heuristic modifications to the filtering algorithms allow them to be applied efficiently to very large models by sequentially processing observations and computing the impact of each observation on each state variable in an independent calculation. The ensemble adjustment Kalman filter is applied to a nondivergent barotropic model on the sphere to demonstrate the capabilities of the filters in models with state spaces that are much larger than the ensemble size.