The GEOS-3 Retrospective Data Assimilation System: The 6-Hour Lag Case

Abstract

The fixed-lag Kalman smoother (FLKS) has been proposed as a framework to construct data assimilation procedures capable of producing high-quality climate research datasets. FLKS-based systems, referred to as retrospective data assimilation systems, are an extension to three-dimensional filtering procedures with the added capability of incorporating observations not only in the past and present time of the estimate, but also at future times. A variety of simplifications are necessary to render retrospective assimilation procedures practical. In this article, an FLKS-based retrospective data assimilation system implementation for the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System is presented. The practicality of this implementation comes from the practicality of its underlying (filter) analysis system, that is, the physical-space statistical analysis system (PSAS). The behavior of two schemes is studied here. The first retrospective analysis (RA) scheme is designed simply to update the regular PSAS analyses with observations available at times ahead of the regular analysis times. Results are presented for when observations 6-h ahead of the analysis time are used to update the PSAS analyses and thereby to calculate the so-called lag-1 retrospective analyses. Consistency tests for this RA scheme show that the lag-1 retrospective analyses indeed have better 6-h predictive skill than the predictions from the regular analyses. This motivates the introduction of the second retrospective analysis scheme, which, at each analysis time, uses the 6-h retrospective analysis to create a new forecast to replace the forecast normally used in the PSAS analysis, and therefore allows the calculation of a revised (filter) PSAS analysis. This procedure is referred to as the retrospective-based iterated analysis (RIA) scheme. Results from the RIA scheme indicate its potential for improving the overall quality of the assimilation.