Comparison of Perturbation Strategies for the Initial Ensemble in Ocean Data Assimilation with a Fully Coupled Earth System Model

Abstract

It is widely recognized that the initial ensemble describes the uncertainty of the variables and, thus, affects the performance of ensemble-based assimilation techniques, which is investigated in this paper with experiments using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) assimilation software. Five perturbation strategies involving adding noises of different patterns and with/without extra integration are compared in the observation system simulation experiments framework, in which the SST is assimilated with the ensemble adjustment Kalman filter method. The comparison results show that for the observed variables (sea surface temperature), the differences in the initial ensemble lead to different rate of convergence in the assimilation, but all experiments reach convergence after three months. However, other variables (sea surface height and sea surface salinity) are more sensitive to the initial ensemble. The analysis of variance results reveal that the white-noise perturbation scheme has the largest RMSE. After excluding the effect of the white noise perturbation scheme, it can be found that the difference in the effect of different initial ensembles on the SSH with only assimilated SST is concentrated in the region of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which is related to the spread of the covariance between the SSH and the SST.