Background Error Covariances in the JEDI System

Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) is developed at the JCSDA in collaboration with NOAA, NASA, US Navy, US Air Force, UK Met Office, and NCAR. The goal of the project is to develop a cutting-edge data assimilation system that can be used with different prediction systems including atmosphere, land, ocean, sea-ice, atmospheric composition, and coupled Earth system prediction systems. An important input to the data assimilation process is the background state (also called the a priori or reference state) of the system being forecasted. The true background state cannot be fully known, so it must be estimated. Errors in the estimation of the background state are accounted for with the background error covariance matrix B. SABER (System Agnostic Background Error Representation) is the JEDI system component that provides different background error covariance representations that can be used with a wide range of the Earth System models. This presentation will show the current status and the future plans for the background error covariance capabilities in JEDI.