Abstract

In recent years considerable research efforts have been made in data assimilation methods, developed originally for numerical weather prediction, directed now towards more general classes of Earth science problems. Towards these kinds of goals, and in particular to assimilate EOS data, the Data Assimilation Office (DAO) of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center was founded about five years ago. Data assimilation can be thought of as a generalized inversion problem that uses a dynamical model (e.g. a GCM) and measurements to form a global, time-evolving analysis, or state estimate of the Earth system. Many of these algorithms proceed sequentially in time by continuously updating the state of an Earth system model with new measurements. The resulting analyses are supposed to be not only temporally and spatially consistent, but dynamically, radiatively and chemically balanced as well.

© 1997 Optical Society of America