“…Arnold and Dey, 1986;Rohaly and Krishnamurti, 1993). Previous oceanographic applications to sampling strategy optimization, or assessment towards optimization, are reported by Kindle (1986), Barth and Wunsch (1990), Bennett (1990), Hernandez et al (1994) and Hackert et al (1998). OSSEs were also recently applied to observing systems design assessment in the Atlantic Ocean, using statistical methods (Guinehut et al, 2002(Guinehut et al, , 2004, in the Mediterranean Sea, using twin experiments (Raicich and Rampazzo, 2003;Griffa et al, 2006;Taillandier et al, 2006) and in the Baltic Sea and North Sea, in the Optimal Design of Observational Networks project (She et al, 2006).…”