We present a detailed description of TOPAZ4, the latest version of TOPAZ – a coupled ocean-sea ice data assimilation system for the North Atlantic Ocean and Arctic. It is the only operational, large-scale ocean data assimilation system that uses the ensemble Kalman filter. This means that TOPAZ features a time-evolving, state-dependent estimate of the state error covariance. Based on results from the pilot MyOcean reanalysis f...

Data assimilation methods often use an ensemble to represent the background error covariance. Two approaches are commonly used; a simple one with a static ensemble, or a more advanced one with a dynamic ensemble. The latter is often non-practical due to its high computational requirements. Some recent studies suggested using a hybrid covariance, which is a linear combination of the covariances represented by a static and a dyn...