The MPE CDT would like to congratulate Jemima Tabeart* on the publication of her first research paper entitled: “The conditioning of least-squares problems in variational data assimilation”. In this article, Jemima and co-authors develop a new theory for bounding the condition number of the Hessian of the least-squares objective function. This theory applies to both uncorrelated and correlated choices of observation error. The paper investigates the impact of introducing these correlations via small-scale numerical tests, which illustrate the influence of observation correlations associated with a physical length scale. Further details can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nla.2165/full
*Jemima Tabeart is a 2nd year PhD student currently carrying out project under the supervision of Sarah Dance (University of Reading, Department of Meteorology).
