A comparative study of 4D-VAR and a 4D Ensemble Kalman Filter: perfect model simulations with Lorenz-96

We formulate a four-dimensional Ensemble Kalman Filter (4D-LETKF) that minimizes a cost function similar to that in a 4D-VAR method. Using perfect model experiments with the Lorenz-96 model, we compare assimilation of simulated asynchronous observations with 4D-VAR and 4D-LETKF. We find that both schemes have comparable error when 4D-LETKF is performed sufficiently frequently and when 4D-VAR is performed over a sufficiently long analysis time window. We explore how the error depends on the time between analyses for 4D-LETKF and the analysis time window for 4D-VAR.