Engineering Commons^™

A Comparison Of Data Assimilation Methods Using A Planetary Geostrophic Model, Edward D. Zaron

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Assimilating hydrographic observations into a planetary geostrophic model is posed as a problem in control theory. The cost functional is the sum of weighted model and data residuals. Model errors are assumed to be spatially correlated, and hydrographic station data are assimilated directly. Searches in state space and data space, for minimizing the cost functional, are compared to a direct matrix inversion algorithm in the data space. State-space methods seek the minimizer of the cost functional by performing a preconditioned search in an N-dimensional space of state or control variables, where N is approximately 650 000 in the present calculations. …