The 8th EnKF Data Assimilation Workshop




High-rank Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (HETKF)

Bo Huang; Xuguang Wang; Craig Bishop
University of Oklahoma, USA


Talk: EnKF_Huang_Wang_final.pdf

Covariance localization is typically achieved in ETKF by inflating the observation error variance with an increasing distance from the state variable of interest (hereafter R-localization). Alternatively, it can be achieved by directly modulating the raw prior ensemble perturbations through an element-wise product of each raw prior ensemble perturbation with each column of a modulation matrix (hereafter MP-localization with MP standing for modulated perturbations). The modulation matrix is defined through the covariance localization functions. It is shown mathematically that for a given modulation matrix, the MP-localization method has a higher rank (hereafter HETKF) than the R-localization.

In this study, extensive cycling experiments are conducted to reveal the differences of the MP-localization and the R-localization for ETKF. MP-localization outperforms R-localization. The superiority of MP-localization is more obvious for smaller ensemble size. With a fixed ensemble size but increased observation densities, the advantage of MP-localization over R-localization is reduced possibly due to the systemic improvement by assimilating larger number of observations. MP-localization is less sensitive to the localization length scales.