A case study of the consistency problem in the inverse estimation

Inverse technique is a widely used method in oceanography, but it has a problem that the retrieved solutions often violate model prior assumptions. To tune the model has consistent solutions, an iteration approach, which successively utilizes the posterior statistics for next round inverse estimation, is introduced and tested from a real case study. It is found that the consistency may become elusive as the determinants of solution and noise covariance matrices become zero in the iteration process. However, after several steps of such operation, the difference between posterior statistics and the model prior ones can be gradually reduced.