The impact of open boundary forcing on forecasting the East Australian Current using ensemble data assimilation

- Study quantifies forecast errors of an ocean model using all available observations.
- Error characteristics of several common open boundary nesting approaches are quantified.
- New approach to nesting in own analysis provides an inexpensive alternative for regional ocean prediction.
- Improved methods for predicting salient features of the mesoscale ocean in dynamic regions.

We investigate the performance of an eddy resolving regional ocean forecasting system of the East Australian Current (EAC) for both ensemble optimal interpolation (EnOI) and ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) with a focus on open boundary model nesting solutions. The performance of nesting into a global re-analysis; nesting into the system's own analysis; and nesting into a free model is quantified in terms of forecast innovation error. Nesting in the global reanalysis is found to yield the best results. This is closely followed by the system that nests inside its own analysis, which seems to represent a viable practical option in the absence of a suitable analysis to nest within. Nesting into a global reanalysis without data assimilation and nesting into an unconstrained model were both found to be unable to constrain the mesoscale circulation at all times. We also find that for a specific interior area of the domain where the EAC separation takes place, there is a mixture of results for all the systems investigated here and that, whilst the application of EnKF generates the best results overall, there are still times when not even this method is able to constrain the circulation in this region with the available observations.