A mollified ensemble Kalman filter

It is well recognized that discontinuous analysis increments of sequential data assimilation systems, such as ensemble Kalman filters, might lead to spurious high-frequency adjustment processes in the model dynamics. Various methods have been devised to spread out the analysis increments continuously over a fixed time interval centred about the analysis time. Among these techniques are nudging and incremental analysis updates (IAU). Here we propose another alternative, which may be viewed as a hybrid of nudging and IAU and which arises naturally from a recently proposed continuous formulation of the ensemble Kalman analysis step. A new slow-fast extension of the popular Lorenz-96 model is introduced to demonstrate the properties of the proposed mollified ensemble Kalman filter. Copyright (C) 2010 Royal Meteorological Society