Assimilation in a complex model

Introduction

Running a successful assimilation takes careful diagnostic work and experiment iterations to find the best settings for your specific case.

The basic Kalman filter can be coded in only a handful of lines. The difficulty in getting an assimilation system working properly involves making the right choices to compensate for sampling errors, model bias, observation error, lack of model forecast divergence, variations in observation density in space and time, random correlations, etc. There are tools built into DART to deal with most of these problems but it takes careful work to apply them correctly.

Your first attempt

If you are adding a new model or a new observation type, you should assimilate exactly one observation, with no model advance, with inflation turned off, with a large cutoff, and with the outlier threshold off (see below for how to set these namelist items).

Run an assimilation. Look at the obs_seq.final file to see what the forward operator computed. Use ncdiff to difference the preassim_mean.nc and postassim_mean.nc (or output_mean.nc) diagnostic NetCDF files and look at the changes (the “innovations”) in the various model fields. Is it in the right location for that observation? Does it have a reasonable value?

Then assimilate a group of observations and check the results carefully. Run the observation diagnostics and look at the total error and spread. Look carefully at the number of observations being assimilated compared to how many are available.

Assimilations that are not working can give good looking statistics if they reject all but the few observations that happen to match the current state. The errors should grow as the model advances and then shrink when new observations are assimilated, so a timeseries plot of the RMSE should show a sawtooth pattern. The initial error entirely depends on the match between the initial ensemble and the observations and may be large but it should decrease and then reach a roughly stable level. The ensemble spread should ultimately remain relatively steady, at a value around the expected observation error level. Once you believe you have a working assimilation, this will be your baseline case.

If the ensemble spread is too small, several of the DART facilities described below are intended to compensate for ensemble members getting too close to each other. Then one by one enable or tune each of the items below, checking each time to see what is the effect on the results.

Next attempts

High-level data assimilation workflows gives an overview of a variety of complete assimilation experiments, including the programs which need to be run and their input and output.

Important features of assimilations

Suggestions for the most common namelist settings and features built into DART for running a successful assimilation include:

Ensemble size

In practice, ensemble sizes between 20 and 100 seem to work best. Fewer than 20-30 members leads to statistical errors which are too large. More than 100 members takes longer to run with very little benefit, and eventually the results get worse again. Often the limit on the number of members is based on the size of the model since you have to run N copies of the model each time you move forward in time. If you can, start with 50-60 members and then experiment with fewer or more once you have a set of baseline results to compare it with. The namelist setting for ensemble size is &filter_nml :: ens_size

Localization

There are two main advantages to using localization. One is it avoids an observation impacting unrelated state variables because of spurious correlations. The other is that, especially for large models, it improves run-time performance because only points within the localization radius need to be considered. Because of the way the parallelization was implemented in DART, localization was easy to add and using it usually results in a very large performance gain. See here for a discussion of localization-related namelist items.

Inflation

Since the filter is run with a number of members which is usually small compared to the number of degrees of freedom of the model (i.e. the size of the state vector or the number of EOFs needed to characterize the variability), the model uncertainty is under-represented. Other sources of error and uncertainty are not represented at all. These factors lead to the ensemble being ‘over-confident’, or having too little spread. More observations leads to more over-confidence. This characteristic can worsen with time, leading to ensemble collapse to a single solution. Inflation increases the spread of the members in a systematic way to overcome this problem. There are several sophisticated options on inflation, including spatial and temporal adaptive and damping options, which help deal with observations which vary in density over time and location. See Inflation for a discussion of inflation-related namelist items.

Outlier rejection

Outlier rejection can be used to avoid bad observations (ones where the value was recorded in error or the processing has an error and a non-physical value was generated). It also avoids observations which have accurate values but the mean of the ensemble members is so far from the observation value that assimilating it would result in unacceptably large increments that might destablize the model run. If the difference between the observation and the prior ensemble mean is more than N standard deviations from the square root of the sum of the prior ensemble and observation error variance, the observation will be rejected. The namelist setting for the number of standard deviations to include is &filter_nml :: outlier_threshold and we typically suggest starting with a value of 3.0.

Sampling error

For small ensemble sizes a table of expected statistical error distributions can be generated before running DART. Corrections accounting for these errors are applied during the assimilation to increase the ensemble spread which can improve the assimilation results. The namelist item to enable this option is &assim_tools_nml :: sampling_error_correction. Additionally you will need to have the precomputed correction file sampling_error_correction_table.nc, in the run directory. See the description of the namelist item in the &assim_tools_nml namelist, and PROGRAM gen_sampling_err_table for instructions on where to find (or how to generate) the auxiliary file needed by this code. See Anderson (2011).

Free run/forecast after assimilation

Separate scripting can be done to support forecasts starting from the analyzed model states. After filter exits, the models can be run freely (with no assimilated data) further forward in time using one or more of the last updated model states from filter. Since all ensemble members are equally likely a member can be selected at random, or a member close to the mean can be chosen. See the PROGRAM closest_member_tool for one way to select a “close” member. The ensemble mean is available to be used, but since it is a combination of all the member states it may not have self-consistent features, so using a single member is usually preferred.

Evaluating observations without assimilation

Filter can be used to evaluate the accuracy of a single model state based on a set of available observations. Either copy or link the model state file so there appear to be 2 separate ensemble members (which are identical). Set the filter namelist ensemble size to 2 by setting ens_size to 2 in the &filter_nml namelist. Turn off the outlier threshold and both Prior and Posterior inflation by setting outlier_threshold to -1, and both the inf_flavor values to 0 in the same &filter_nml namelist. Set all observation types to be ‘evaluate-only’ and have no types in the ‘assimilate’ list by listing all types in the evaluate_these_obs_types list in the &obs_kind_nml section of the namelist, and none in the assimilation list. Run filter as usual, including model advances if needed. Run observation diagnostics on the resulting obs_seq.final file to compute the difference between the observed values and the predicted values from this model state.

Verification/comparison with and without assimilation

To compare results of an experiment with and without assimilating data, do one run assimilating the observations. Then do a second run where all the observation types are moved to the evaluate_these_obs_types list in the &obs_kind_nml section of the namelist. Also turn inflation off by setting both inf_flavor values to 0 in the &filter_nml namelist. The forward operators will still be called, but they will have no impact on the model state. Then the two sets of diagnostic state space netcdf files can be compared to evaluate the impact of assimilating the observations, and the observation diagnostic files can also be compared.

DART quality control flag added to output observation sequence file

The filter adds a quality control field with metadata ‘DART quality control’ to the obs_seq.final file. At present, this field can have the following values:

0:

Observation was assimilated successfully

1:

Observation was evaluated (as specified in namelist) and not used in the assimilation

2:

The observation was used but one or more of the posterior forward observation operators failed

3:

The observation was evaluated AND one or more of the posterior forward observation operators failed

4:

One or more prior forward observation operators failed so the observation was not used

5:

The observation was not used because it was not selected in the namelist to be assimilated or evaluated

6:

The prior quality control value was too high so the observation was not used.

7:

Outlier test failed (see below)

8:

Vertical conversion failed

The outlier test computes the difference between the observation value and the prior ensemble mean. It then computes a standard deviation by taking the square root of the sum of the observation error variance and the prior ensemble variance for the observation. If the difference between the ensemble mean and the observation value is more than the specified number of standard deviations, then the observation is not used and the DART quality control field is set to 7.