Hybrid machine learning data assimilation for marine biogeochemistry

Abstract. Marine biogeochemistry models are critical for forecasting, as well as estimating ecosystem responses to climate change and human activities. Data assimilation (DA) improves predictions from these models by aligning them with real-world observations, but marine biogeochemistry DA faces challenges due to model complexity, non-linearity, and sparse, uncertain observations. Existing DA methods applied to marine biogeochemistry struggle to update unobserved variables effectively, while ensemble-based methods are computationally too expensive for high-complexity marine biogeochemistry models. This study demonstrates how machine learning (ML) can improve marine biogeochemistry DA by learning statistical relationships between observed and unobserved variables. We integrate ML-driven balancing schemes into a 1D prototype of a system used to forecast marine biogeochemistry in the North-West European Shelf seas. ML is applied to estimate (i) state-dependent correlations from free-run ensembles and (ii), in an “end-to-end” fashion, analysis increments from an Ensemble Kalman Filter. Our results show that ML improves updates for previously not-updated variables when compared to univariate schemes akin to those used operationally, particularly in lead times smaller than 5 d. Furthermore, ML models exhibit some potential for transferability to new locations, a crucial step toward scaling these methods to 3D operational systems. We conclude that ML offers a clear pathway to overcome current computational bottlenecks in marine biogeochemistry DA and that refining transferability, optimising training data sampling, and evaluating scalability for large-scale marine forecasting, should be future research priorities.