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Revision of TR-09-25: A Hybrid Variational/Ensemble Filter Approach to Data Assimilation
Two families of methods are widely used in data assimilation: the
four dimensional variational (4D-Var) approach, and the ensemble Kalman filter
(EnKF) approach. The two families have been developed largely through parallel
research efforts. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. It is of
interest to develop hybrid data assimilation
algorithms that can combine the relative strengths of the two approaches.
This paper proposes a subspace approach to investigate the theoretical equivalence between the suboptimal
4D-Var method (where only a small number of optimization iterations are
performed) and the practical EnKF method (where only a small number of ensemble
members are used) in a linear Gaussian setting. The analysis motivates a new
hybrid algorithm: the optimization directions obtained from a short window
4D-Var run are used to construct the EnKF initial ensemble.
The proposed hybrid method is computationally less expensive than a full
4D-Var, as only short assimilation windows are considered. The hybrid method has the potential to
perform better than the regular EnKF due to its look-ahead property.
Numerical results
show that the proposed hybrid ensemble filter method performs better than the
regular EnKF method for both linear and nonlinear test problems
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