Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

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Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 10, 19219-19245, 2010
www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/19219/2010/
doi:10.5194/acpd-10-19219-2010
© Author(s) 2010. This work is distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.


Technical Note: Propagating correlations in atmospheric inversions using different Kalman update smoothers

J. Tang1,2 and Q. Zhuang1,2,3
1Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
2Purdue Climate Change Research Center, West Lafayette, IN, USA
3Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Abstract. Propagating correlations between on-line and off-line state variables in the problem of sequential inversion of surface fluxes for atmospheric CH is investigated with the fixed-lag Kalman smoother, the fixed-lag ensemble square root Kalman smoother and the fixed-lag square root sigma-point Kalman smoother. The formulae for the fixed-lag Kalman smoother in Bruhwiler et al. (2005) are further developed with a more concise representation of the posterior covariance. Extension to the fixed-lag ensemble square root Kalman smoother and fixed-lag square root sigma-point Kalman smoother allows us to treat nonlinear observation operators easily. To constrain the posterior fluxes within their feasible ranges, the constrained fixed-lag Kalman smoother is also presented, and the variable transform technique is implemented for the other two smoothers. Results with synthetic inversion of CH fluxes indicate that our developed methods are good alternatives to existing methods for conducting sequential inversion of atmospheric trace gases. It is also shown that the benefit of including the correlation between on-line and off-line state variables is case dependent.

Citation: Tang, J. and Zhuang, Q.: Technical Note: Propagating correlations in atmospheric inversions using different Kalman update smoothers, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 10, 19219-19245, doi:10.5194/acpd-10-19219-2010, 2010.
 
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