An Adaptive Compensatory Approach of the Fixed Localization in the EnKF

Although the fixed covariance localization in the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) can significantly increase the reliability of background error covariance, it has been demonstrated that extreme impact radii can cause the EnKF to lose some useful information. Tuning an optimal impact radius, on the other hand, is always difficult for a general circulation model. The EnKF multiscale analysis (MSA) approach was presented to make up for the above-mentioned drawback of the fixed localization. As a follow-up, this study presents an adaptive compensatory approach to further improve the performance of the EnKF-MSA. The new method adaptively triggers a multigrid analysis (MGA) to extract multiscale information from the observational residual after the EnKF without inflation is completed at each analysis step. Within a biased twin experiment framework consisting of a barotropic spectral model and an idealized observing system, the performance of the adaptive method is examined. Results show that the MGA reduces the computational cost of the MSA by 93%. On the assimilation quality, the adaptive method has an incremental improvement over the EnKF-MSA. That is, the adaptive EnKF-MGA reduces to the EnKF without inflation, which is better than the EnKF-MSA, for moderate impact radii. The proposed scheme works for a broader range of impact radii than the standard EnKF (i.e., the EnKF with inflation). For extreme impact radii, the adaptive EnKF-MGA can produce smaller assimilation errors than the standard EnKF and shorten the spinup period by 53%. In addition, the computational cost of the MGA is negligible relative to that of the standard EnKF.