Data Assimilation - Other Applications of Data Assimilation

Other Applications of Data Assimilation

Data assimilation methods are currently also used in other environmental forecasting problems, e.g. in hydrological forecasting. Basically, the same types of data assimilation methods as those described above are in use there. An example of chemical data assimilation using Autochem can be found at CDACentral.

Given the abundance of spacecraft data for other planets in the Solar System, data assimilation is now also applied beyond the Earth to obtain re-analyses of the atmospheric state of extraterrestrial planets. Mars is the first extraterrestrial planet which data assimilation has been applied to, so far. Available spacecraft data include, in particular, retrievals of temperature and dust/water ice optical ticknesses from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer onboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Climate Sounder onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Two methods of data assimilation have been applied to these datasets: an Analysis Correction scheme and two Ensemble Kalman Filter schemes, both using a global circulation model of the martian atmosphere as forward model. The Mars Analysis Correction Data Assimilation (MACDA) dataset is publicly available from the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

Data assimilation is a part of the challenge for every forecasting problem.

Dealing with biased data is a serious challenge in data assimilation. Further development of methods to deal with biases will be of particular use. If there are several instruments observing the same variable then intercomparing them using probability distribution functions can be instructive. Such an analysis is available on line at PDFCentral designed for the validation of observations from the NASA Aura satellite.