An Object-oriented Data Assimilation Toolkit — Community Data Assimilation Repository

Data assimilation is a quite complex system. Community development of a sophisticated data assimilation repository could resolve redundancy and improve efficiency by sharing expertise and software. Most of the modern data assimilation systems are difficult engaging such development. Object-oriented design is widely used in computer software architecture designs. It differs from traditional procedure oriented design and provides mechanisms for independent development and coordination, such as encapsulation, inheritance, abstract and polymorphism. These mechanisms allow developers to concentrate on their objects instead of the procedures and coordinate these efforts through designated interfaces. Some meteorological centers have considered modernizing their systems following an object-oriented design, for example, ECMWF's OOPS (Object-oriented Prediction System). In this presentation, a data assimilation architecture is laid out as an object-oriented design and a community data assimilation repository (CDAR) is proposed. Some technical issues will also be discussed.