On the Use of a Local Wind Correction Technique in Four-Dimensional Data Assimilation

Abstract

A series of numerical experiments was conducted in which asynoptic observations of the mass field were assimilated in a primitive equation, barotropic model with and without a local wind adjustment at insertion times. Objective measures of assimilation are defined and used to show that correcting the motion field from asynoptically-observed mass-field gradients accelerates the assimilation process, independent of the frequency of insertion or the quantity of data. However, the degree of assimilation was observed to depend on both frequency and quantity.