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The ring-shedding process in the Agulhas Current is studied using the ensemble Kalman filter to assimilate Geosat altimeter data into a two layer quasi-geostrophic ocean model. The properties of the ensemble Kalman filter are further explored with focus on the analysis scheme and the use of gridded data. The Geosat data consist of 10 fields of gridded sea-surface height anomalies separated 10 days apart which are added to a climatic mean field. This corresponds to a huge number of data values and a data reduction scheme must be applied to increase the efficiency of the analysis procedure. Further, it is illustrated how one can resolve the rank problem occurring when a too large data set or a small ensemble is used. 1 Introduction The Agulhas Current is a western-boundary current flowing along the east coast of South Africa. Its water originates from the Mozambique channel (see e.g. Saetre and da Silva, 1984) and from east of Madagascar (e.g. Lutjeharms et al., 1981) as part of the sub...
Evensen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.