The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) implemented the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) 3dVAR analysis as part of the global data assimilation system on 01 May 2007. The version that was implemented was developed by the Environmental Modeling Center with contributions from many collaborators and is intended to be the basis of future variational analysis system advancements.

The presentation will give a brief overview and status update of the GSI, as well as discuss some recent developments and future plans. Two of the more exciting developments that will be discussed are the inclusion of flow-dependent background error variances and the first-order time extrapolation to the observation (FOTO) to include some time evolution information in the analysis. Although this presentation will focus primarily on the global version of GSI, each of the experimental components have been developed such that they can be easily applied to other applications and by other groups, such as the regional NCEP model, NASA/GMAO, and other collaborators.