Strongly coupled data assimilation (SCDA) views the Earth as one unified system. This allows observations to have an instantaneous impact across boundaries such as the air‐sea interface when estimating the state of each individual component. Operational prediction centers are moving toward Earth system modeling for all forecast timescales, ranging from days to months. However, there have been few studies that examine fundamental aspects of SCDA and the transition from traditional approaches that apply data assimilation only to a single component, whether forecasts were derived from a coupled model or an uncoupled forced model. The SCDA approach is examined here in detail using numerical experiments with a simple coupled atmosphere‐ocean quasi‐geostrophic model. The impact of coupling is explored with respect to its impact on the Lyapunov spectrum and on data assimilation system stability. Different data assimilation methods are compared within the context of SCDA, including the 3‐D and 4‐D Variational methods, the ensemble Kalman filter, and the hybrid gain method. The impact of observing system coverage is also investigated. We find that SCDA is generally superior to weakly coupled or uncoupled approaches. Dynamically defined background error covariance estimates are essential for SCDA to achieve an accurate coupled state estimate as the observing system becomes sparser. As a clarification of seemingly contradictory findings from previous studies, it is shown that ocean observations can adequately constrain atmospheric state estimates provided that the analysis‐observing frequency is sufficiently high and the ensemble size determining the background error covariance is sufficiently large.

We estimate the effect of model deficiencies in the Global Forecast System that lead to systematic forecast errors, as a first step toward correcting them online (i.e., within the model) as in Danforth & Kalnay (2008a, 2008b). Since the analysis increments represent the corrections that new observations make on the 6 h forecast in the analysis cycle, we estimate the model bias corrections from the time average of the analysis increments divided by 6 h, assuming that initial model errors grow linearly and first ignoring the impact of observation bias. During 2012–2016, seasonal means of the 6 h model bias are generally robust despite changes in model resolution and data assimilation systems, and their broad continental scales explain their insensitivity to model resolution. The daily bias dominates the submonthly analysis increments and consists primarily of diurnal and semidiurnal components, also requiring a low dimensional correction. Analysis increments in 2015 and 2016 are reduced over oceans, which we attribute to improvements in the specification of the sea surface temperatures. These results provide support for future efforts to make online correction of the mean, seasonal, and diurnal and semidiurnal model biases of Global Forecast System to reduce both systematic and random errors, as suggested by Danforth & Kalnay (2008a, 2008b). It also raises the possibility that analysis increments could be used to provide guidance in testing new physical parameterizations.

No abstract

No abstract