Physically Constrained Covariance Inflation from Location Uncertainty

Abstract: Motivated by the concept of location uncertainty", initially introduced in \cite{Memin2013FluidFD}, a scheme is sought to perturb thelocation" of a state variable at every forecast time step. Further considering Brenier's theorem \cite{Brenier1991}, asserting that the difference of two positive density fields on the same domain can be represented by a transportation map, perturbations are demonstrated to consistently define a SPDE from the original PDE. It ensues that certain quantities, up to the user, are conserved at every time step. Remarkably, derivations following both the SALT \cite{Holm2015VariationalPF} and LU \cite{Memin2013FluidFD, Resseguier2016GeophysicalFU} settings, can be recovered from this perturbation scheme. Still, it opens broader applicability since it does not explicitly rely on Lagrangian mechanics or Newton's laws of force. For illustration, a stochastic version of the thermal shallow water equation is presented.