Assimilation of temperature and salinity using isotropic and anisotropic recursive filters in Tropic Pacific

A data assimilation scheme used in the updated Ocean three-dimensional Variational Assimilation System (OVALS), OVALS2, is described. Based on a recursive filter (RF) to estimate the background error covariance (BEC) over a predetermined scale, this new analysis system can be implemented with anisotropic and isotropic BECs. Similarities and differences of these two BEC schemes are briefly discussed and their impacts on the model simulation are also investigated. An idealized experiment demonstrates the ability of the updated analysis system to construct different BECs. Furthermore, a set of three years experiments is implemented by assimilating expendable bathythermograph (XBT) and ARGO data into a Tropical Pacific circulation model. The TAO and WOA01 data are used to validate the assimilation results. The results show that the model simulations are substantially improved by OVALS2. The inter-comparison of isotropic and anisotropic BEC shows that the corresponding temperature and salinity produced by the anisotropic BEC are almost as good as those obtained by the isotropic one. Moreover, the result of anisotropic RF is slightly closer to WOA01 and TAO than that of isotropic RF in some special area (e.g. the cold tongue area in the Tropic Pacific).