Chemical state estimation for the middle atmosphere by four-dimensional variational data assimilation: System configuration

A novel stratospheric chemical data assimilation system has been developed and applied to Environmental Satellite Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (ENVISAT/MIPAS) data, aiming to combine the sophistication of the four-dimensional variational (4D-var) technique with flow-dependent covariance modeling and also to improve numerical performance. The system is tailored for operational stratospheric chemistry state monitoring. The atmospheric model of the assimilation system includes a state-of-the-art stratospheric chemistry transport module along with its adjoint and the German weather service's global meteorological forecast model, providing meteorological parameters. Both models share the same grid and same advection time step, to ensure dynamic consistency without spatial and temporal interpolation errors. A notable numerical efficiency gain is obtained through an icosahedral grid. As a novel feature in stratospheric variational data assimilation a special focus was placed on an optimal spatial exploitation of satellite data by dynamic formulation of the forecast error covariance matrix, providing potential vorticity controlled anisotropic and inhomogeneous influence radii. In this first part of the study the design and numerical features of the data assimilation system is presented, along with analyses of two case studies and a posteriori validation. Assimilated data include retrievals of O3, CH4, N2O, NO2, HNO3, and water vapor. The analyses are compared with independent observations provided by Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II (SAGE II) and Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) retrievals. It was found that there are marked improvements for both analyses and assimilation based forecasts when compared with control model runs without any data ingestion