•Used by Anderson (2001), Whitaker and Hamill (2002) to validate their ensemble square root filter (EnSRF)
•A very large global ensemble Kalman Filter converges to an “optimal” analysis rms error=0.20
•This “optimal” rms error is achieved by the LEKF for a range of small ensemble members
•We performed experiments for different size models: M=40 (original), M=80 and M=120, and compared a global KF with the LEKF