The concepts of sample sphere radius and sample density are proposed in this paper to help illustrate that different vector transformations result in diverse sample density with the same sample ensemble, which finally affects their assimilation performance. Several numerical experiments using a onedimensional (1-D) soil water equation and synthetic observations are conducted to evaluate this new theory in land data assimilation.
The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method is used to construct a set of basis functions for spanning the ensemble of data in a certain least squares optimal sense. Compared with the singular value decomposition (SVD), the POD basis functions can capture more energy in the forecast ensemble space and can represent its spatial structure and temporal evolution more effectively. After the analysis variables are expressed by a truncated expansion of the POD basis vectors in the ensemble space, the control variables appear explicitly in the cost function, so that the adjoint model, which is used to de-rive the gradient of the cost function with respect to the control variables, is no longer needed. The application of this new technique significantly simplifies the data assimilation process. Several as-similation experiments show that this POD-based explicit four-dimensional variational data assimila-tion method performs much better than the usual ensemble Kalman filter method on both enhancing the assimilation precision and reducing the computation cost. It is also better than the SVD-based ex-plicit four-dimensional assimilation method, especially when the forecast model is not perfect and the forecast error comes from both the noise of the initial filed and the uncertainty of the forecast model.
The Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) is well known and widely used in land data assimilation for its high precision and simple operation. The land surface models used as the forecast operator in a land data assimilation system are usually designed to consider the model subgrid-heterogeneity and soil water thawing and freezing. To neglect their effects could lead to some errors in soil moisture assimilation. The dual EnKF method is employed in soil moisture data assimilation to build a soil moisture data as- similation framework based on the NCAR Community Land Model version 2.0 (CLM 2.0) in considera- tion of the effects of the model subgrid-heterogeneity and soil water thawing and freezing: Liquid volumetric soil moisture content in a given fraction is assimilated through the state filter process, while solid volumetric soil moisture content in the same fraction and solid/liquid volumetric soil moisture in the other fractions are optimized by the parameter filter. Preliminary experiments show that this dual EnKF-based assimilation framework can assimilate soil moisture more effectively and precisely than the usual EnKF-based assimilation framework without considering the model subgrid-scale heteroge- neity and soil water thawing and freezing. With the improvement of soil moisture simulation, the soil temperature-simulated precision can be also improved to some extent.
Land surface models are often highly nonlinear with model physics that contain parameterized discontinuities. These model attributes severely limit the application of advanced variational data assimilation methods into land data assimilation. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been widely employed for land data assimilation because of its simple conceptual formulation and relative ease of implementation. An updated ensemble-based three-dimensional variational assimilation (En3-DVar) method is proposed for land data assimilation.This new method incorporates Monte Carlo sampling strategies into the 3-D variational data assimilation framework. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique is used to efficiently approximate a forecast ensemble produced by the Monte Carlo method in a 3-D space that uses a set of base vectors that span the ensemble. The data assimilation process is thus significantly simplified. Our assimilation experiments indicate that this new En3-DVar method considerably outperforms the EnKF method by increasing assimilation precision. Furthermore, computational costs for the new En3-DVar method are much lower than for the EnKF method.
