Assimilation of Stratospheric Chemical Tracer Observations Using a Kalman Filter. Part I: Formulation

Abstract The first part of this two-part article describes the formulation of a Kalman filter system for assimilating limb-sounding observations of stratospheric chemical constituents into a tracer transport model. The system is based on a two-dimensional isentropic approximation, permitting a full Kalman filter implementation and a thorough study of its behavior in a real-data environment. Datasets from two instruments on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite with very different viewing geometries are used in the assimilation experiments. A robust chi-squared diagnostic, which compares statistics of the observed-minus-forecast residuals with those calculated by the filter algorithm, is used to help formulate the statistical inputs to the filter, as well as to tune covariance parameters and to validate the assimilation results. Two significant departures from the standard (discrete) Kalman filter formulation were found to be important in this study. First, it was discovered that the standard Kalman filt...