Application of a recursive filter to a three-dimensional variational ocean data assimilation system

In order to improve the efficiency of the Ocean Variational Assimilation System (OVALS), which has been widely used in various applications, an improved OVALS (OVALS2) is developed based on the recursive filter (RF) algorithm. The first advantage of OVALS2 is that memory storage can be substantially reduced in practice because it implicitly computes the background error covariance matrix; the second advantage is that there is no inversion of the background error covariance by preconditioning the control var...