Four-Dimensional Assimilation In the Presence of Baroclinic Instability

Current operational assimilation methods have revealed deficiencies in cases of strong baroclinic development. Baroclinic conditions are therefore appropriate for evaluating the potential for improvement which could be achieved through the implementation of a fully four-dimensional data assimilation. In this paper the behaviour of a variational scheme is investigated for a typical baroclinic instability problem, where a wave develops and retroacts on to the basic zonal flow