scholarly journals Improvement of ozone forecast over Beijing based on ensemble Kalman filter with simultaneous adjustment of initial conditions and emissions

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 12901-12916 ◽  
Author(s):  
X. Tang ◽  
J. Zhu ◽  
Z. F. Wang ◽  
A. Gbaguidi

Abstract. In order to improve the surface ozone forecast over Beijing and surrounding regions, data assimilation method integrated into a high-resolution regional air quality model and a regional air quality monitoring network are employed. Several advanced data assimilation strategies based on ensemble Kalman filter are designed to adjust O3 initial conditions, NOx initial conditions and emissions, VOCs initial conditions and emissions separately or jointly through assimilating ozone observations. As a result, adjusting precursor initial conditions demonstrates potential improvement of the 1-h ozone forecast almost as great as shown by adjusting precursor emissions. Nevertheless, either adjusting precursor initial conditions or emissions show deficiency in improving the short-term ozone forecast at suburban areas. Adjusting ozone initial values brings significant improvement to the 1-h ozone forecast, and its limitations lie in the difficulty in improving the 1-h forecast at some urban site. A simultaneous adjustment of the above five variables is found to be able to reduce these limitations and display an overall better performance in improving both the 1-h and 24-h ozone forecast over these areas. The root mean square errors of 1-h ozone forecast at urban sites and suburban sites decrease by 51% and 58% respectively compared with those in free run. Through these experiments, we found that assimilating local ozone observations is determinant for ozone forecast over the observational area, while assimilating remote ozone observations could reduce the uncertainty in regional transport ozone.

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 7811-7849 ◽  
Author(s):  
X. Tang ◽  
J. Zhu ◽  
Z. F. Wang ◽  
A. Gbaguidi

Abstract. We performed ozone data assimilation by simultaneously adjusting the ozone initial conditions, precursor initial conditions and emissions based on the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) and assessed its impacts on ozone modeling and forecasting in Beijing and nearby regions. A high-resolution regional air quality model and a newly established regional monitoring network covering Beijing and its surrounding areas were employed. At each assimilation cycle, the forecast error covariance was sampled from a set of forecast ensembles that were generated by perturbing ozone precursor initial conditions, emissions, photolysis rates and deposition velocity. A model-error module and a local analysis scheme have been introduced to reduce the impact of filter divergence and spurious correlation that accompanied with EnKF. The results showed significant improvement of 1-hour ozone forecast in Beijing and its surrounding areas through separately adjusting ozone initial conditions, precursor initial conditions and emissions with ozone observations. However, adjustment of precursor initial conditions and emissions had minor effect on the 1-hour ozone forecast in suburban area. The best ozone forecast skill was obtained through jointly adjusting ozone initial conditions, NOx and VOC initial conditions and emissions. The root mean square errors of 1-hour ozone forecast at urban sites and suburban sites decreased by 54% and 59% respectively compared with those in free run. Furthermore, the specific impacts of observations from urban and suburban sites on ozone data assimilation were evaluated by implementing sensitivity experiments. Both urban and suburban sites were found to be very important for the improvement of regional ozone forecast. The importance of observational data at urban sites was particularly highlighted through its role in constraining the uncertainty of precursor initial conditions and emission rates. Further improvement of regional ozone forecast might therefore be expected with more routine regional air pollution monitoring stations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 145 (5) ◽  
pp. 1897-1918 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Poterjoy ◽  
Ryan A. Sobash ◽  
Jeffrey L. Anderson

Abstract Particle filters (PFs) are Monte Carlo data assimilation techniques that operate with no parametric assumptions for prior and posterior errors. A data assimilation method introduced recently, called the local PF, approximates the PF solution within neighborhoods of observations, thus allowing for its use in high-dimensional systems. The current study explores the potential of the local PF for atmospheric data assimilation through cloud-permitting numerical experiments performed for an idealized squall line. Using only 100 ensemble members, experiments using the local PF to assimilate simulated radar measurements demonstrate that the method provides accurate analyses at a cost comparable to ensemble filters currently used in weather models. Comparisons between the local PF and an ensemble Kalman filter demonstrate benefits of the local PF for producing probabilistic analyses of non-Gaussian variables, such as hydrometeor mixing ratios. The local PF also provides more accurate forecasts than the ensemble Kalman filter, despite yielding higher posterior root-mean-square errors. A major advantage of the local PF comes from its ability to produce more physically consistent posterior members than the ensemble Kalman filter, which leads to fewer spurious model adjustments during forecasts. This manuscript presents the first successful application of the local PF in a weather prediction model and discusses implications for real applications where nonlinear measurement operators and nonlinear model processes limit the effectiveness of current Gaussian data assimilation techniques.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Regis Sperotto de Quadros ◽  
Fabrício Pereira Harter ◽  
Daniela Buske ◽  
Larri Silveira Pereira

Data Assimilation is a procedure to get the initial condition as accurately as possible, through the statistical combination of collected observations and a background field, usually a short-range forecast. In this research a complete assimilation system for the Lorenz equations based on Ensemble Kalman Filter is presented and examined. The Lorenz model is chosen for its simplicity in structure and the dynamic similarities with primitive equations models, such as modern numerical weather forecasting. Based on results, was concluded that, in this implementation, 10 members is the best setting, because there is an overfitting for ensembles with 50 and 100 members. It was also examined if the EnKF is effective to track the control for 20% and 40% of error in the initial conditions. The results show a disagreement between the “truth” and the estimation, especially in the end of integration period, due the chaotic nature of the system.  It was also concluded that EnKF have to be performed sufficiently frequently in order to produce desirable results.


SPE Journal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 294-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lingzao Zeng ◽  
Haibin Chang ◽  
Dongxiao Zhang

Summary The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been used widely for data assimilation. Because the EnKF is a Monte Carlo-based method, a large ensemble size is required to reduce the sampling errors. In this study, a probabilistic collocation-based Kalman filter (PCKF) is developed to adjust the reservoir parameters to honor the production data. It combines the advantages of the EnKF for dynamic data assimilation and the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) for efficient uncertainty quantification. In this approach, all the system parameters and states and the production data are approximated by the PCE. The PCE coefficients are solved with the probabilistic collocation method (PCM). Collocation realizations are constructed by choosing collocation point sets in the random space. The simulation for each collocation realization is solved forward in time independently by means of an existing deterministic solver, as in the EnKF method. In the analysis step, the needed covariance is approximated by the PCE coefficients. In this study, a square-root filter is employed to update the PCE coefficients. After the analysis, new collocation realizations are constructed. With the parameter collocation realizations as the inputs and the state collocation realizations as initial conditions, respectively, the simulations are forwarded to the next analysis step. Synthetic 2D water/oil examples are used to demonstrate the applicability of the PCKF in history matching. The results are compared with those from the EnKF on the basis of the same analysis. It is shown that the estimations provided by the PCKF are comparable to those obtained from the EnKF. The biggest improvement of the PCKF comes from the leading PCE approximation, with which the computational burden of the PCKF can be greatly reduced by means of a smaller number of simulation runs, and the PCKF outperforms the EnKF for a similar computational effort. When the correlation ratio is much smaller, the PCKF still provides estimations with a better accuracy for a small computational effort.


2013 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
pp. 900-917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fuqing Zhang ◽  
Meng Zhang ◽  
Jonathan Poterjoy

Abstract This study examines the performance of a hybrid ensemble-variational data assimilation system (E3DVar) that couples an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) with the three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVar) system for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model. The performance of E3DVar and the component EnKF and 3DVar systems are compared over the eastern United States for June 2003. Conventional sounding and surface observations as well as data from wind profilers, aircraft and ships, and cloud-tracked winds from satellites, are assimilated every 6 h during the experiments, and forecasts are verified using standard sounding observations. Forecasts with 12- to 72-h lead times are found to have noticeably smaller root-mean-square errors when initialized with the E3DVar system, as opposed to the EnKF, especially for the 12-h wind and moisture fields. The E3DVar system demonstrates similar performance as an EnKF, while using less than half the number of ensemble members, and is less sensitive to the use of a multiphysics ensemble to account for model errors. The E3DVar system is also compared with a similar hybrid method that replaces the 3DVar component with the WRF four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVar) method (denoted E4DVar). The E4DVar method demonstrated considerable improvements over E3DVar for nearly all model levels and variables at the shorter forecast lead times (12–48 h), but the forecast accuracies of all three ensemble-based methods (EnKF, E3DVar, and E4DVar) converge to similar results at longer lead times (60–72 h). Nevertheless, all methods that used ensemble information produced considerably better forecasts than the two methods that relied solely on static background error covariance (i.e., 3DVar and 4DVar).


2005 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 604-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. L. Houtekamer ◽  
Herschel L. Mitchell ◽  
Gérard Pellerin ◽  
Mark Buehner ◽  
Martin Charron ◽  
...  

Abstract An ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been implemented for atmospheric data assimilation. It assimilates observations from a fairly complete observational network with a forecast model that includes a standard operational set of physical parameterizations. To obtain reasonable results with a limited number of ensemble members, severe horizontal and vertical covariance localizations have been used. It is observed that the error growth in the data assimilation cycle is mainly due to model error. An isotropic parameterization, similar to the forecast-error parameterization in variational algorithms, is used to represent model error. After some adjustment, it is possible to obtain innovation statistics that agree with the ensemble-based estimate of the innovation amplitudes for winds and temperature. Currently, no model error is added for the humidity variable, and, consequently, the ensemble spread for humidity is too small. After about 5 days of cycling, fairly stable global filter statistics are obtained with no sign of filter divergence. The quality of the ensemble mean background field, as verified using radiosonde observations, is similar to that obtained using a 3D variational procedure. In part, this is likely due to the form chosen for the parameterized model error. Nevertheless, the degree of similarity is surprising given that the background-error statistics used by the two procedures are rather different, with generally larger background errors being used by the variational scheme. A set of 5-day integrations has been started from the ensemble of initial conditions provided by the EnKF. For the middle and lower troposphere, the growth rates of the perturbations are somewhat smaller than the growth rate of the actual ensemble mean error. For the upper levels, the perturbation patterns decay for about 3 days as a consequence of diffusive model dynamics. These decaying perturbations tend to severely underestimate the actual error that grows rapidly near the model top.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 17511-17536
Author(s):  
C. Lin ◽  
Z. Wang ◽  
J. Zhu

Abstract. An Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) data assimilation system was developed for a regional dust transport model. This paper applied the EnKF method to investigate modeling severe dust storm episodes occurred in March 2002 over China based on surface observations of dust concentrations to explore its impacts on forecast improvement. A series of sensitivity experiments using our system reveals that the EnKF is an advanced assimilation method to afford better initial conditions with surface observed PM10 in North China and lead to improved forecasts of dust storms, but forecast with large errors can be made by model errors. This result illustrates that it requires identifying and correcting model errors during the assimilation procedure in order to significantly improve forecasts. Results also show that the EnKF should use a large inflation parameter to obtain better model performance and forecast potential. Furthermore, the ensemble perturbations generated at the initial time should include enough ensemble spreads to represent the background error after several assimilation cycles.


2007 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 1116-1140 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kuhl ◽  
Istvan Szunyogh ◽  
Eric J. Kostelich ◽  
Gyorgyi Gyarmati ◽  
D. J. Patil ◽  
...  

Abstract In this paper, the spatiotemporally changing nature of predictability is studied in a reduced-resolution version of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS), a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Atmospheric predictability is assessed in the perfect model scenario for which forecast uncertainties are entirely due to uncertainties in the estimates of the initial states. Uncertain initial conditions (analyses) are obtained by assimilating simulated noisy vertical soundings of the “true” atmospheric states with the local ensemble Kalman filter (LEKF) data assimilation scheme. This data assimilation scheme provides an ensemble of initial conditions. The ensemble mean defines the initial condition of 5-day deterministic model forecasts, while the time-evolved members of the ensemble provide an estimate of the evolving forecast uncertainties. The observations are randomly distributed in space to ensure that the geographical distribution of the analysis and forecast errors reflect predictability limits due to the model dynamics and are not affected by inhomogeneities of the observational coverage. Analysis and forecast error statistics are calculated for the deterministic forecasts. It is found that short-term forecast errors tend to grow exponentially in the extratropics and linearly in the Tropics. The behavior of the ensemble is explained by using the ensemble dimension (E dimension), a spatiotemporally evolving measure of the evenness of the distribution of the variance between the principal components of the ensemble-based forecast error covariance matrix. It is shown that in the extratropics the largest forecast errors occur for the smallest E dimensions. Since a low value of the E dimension guarantees that the ensemble can capture a large portion of the forecast error, the larger the forecast error the more certain that the ensemble can fully capture the forecast error. In particular, in regions of low E dimension, ensemble averaging is an efficient error filter and the ensemble spread provides an accurate prediction of the upper bound of the error in the ensemble-mean forecast.


Author(s):  
Nicolas Papadakis ◽  
Etienne Mémin ◽  
Anne Cuzol ◽  
Nicolas Gengembre

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