Ehouarn Simon

Building the capacity for forecasting marine biogeochemistry and ecosystems: recent advances and future developments

Building the capacity for monitoring and forecasting marine biogeochemistry and ecosystem dynamics is a scientific challenge of strategic importance in the context of rapid environmental change and growing public awareness of its potential impacts on marine ecosystems and resources. National Operational Oceanography centres have started to take up this challenge by integrating biogeochemistry in operational systems. Ongoing activities are illustrated in this paper by presenting examples of (pre-)operational biogeochemical systems active in Europe and North America for global to regional applications. First-order principles underlying biogeochemical modelling are briefly introduced along with the description of biogeochemical components implemented in these systems. Applications are illustrated with examples from the fields of hindcasting and monitoring ocean primary production, the assessment of the ocean carbon cycle and the management of living resources. Despite significant progress over the past 5 years in integrating biogeochemistry into (pre-)operational data-assimilation systems, a sustained research effort is still needed to assess these systems and their products with respect to their usefulness to the management of marine systems.

Guaranteeing the convergence of the saddle formulation for weakly‐constrained 4D‐VAR data assimilation

This paper discusses the practical use of the saddle variational formulation for the weakly-constrained 4D-VAR method in data assimilation. It is shown that the method, in its original form, may produce erratic results or diverge because of the inherent lack of monotonicity of the produced objective function values. Convergent, variationaly coherent variants of the algorithm are then proposed whose practical performance is compared to that of other formulations. This comparison is conducted on two data assimilation instances (Burgers equation and the Quasi-Geostrophic model), using two different assumptions on parallel computing environment. Because these variants essentially retain the parallelization advantages of the original proposal, they often --- but not always --- perform best, even for moderate numbers of computing processes.

A note on preconditioning weighted linear least‐squares, with consequences for weakly constrained variational data assimilation

The effect of preconditioning linear weighted least-squares using an approximation of the model matrix is analyzed, showing the interplay of the eigenstructures of both the model and weighting matrices. A small example is given illustrating the resulting potential inefficiency of such preconditioners. Consequences of these results in the context of the weakly-constrained 4D-Var data assimilation problem are finally discussed.