  The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and ensemble square root filter (ESRF) are
data assimilation methods used to combine high dimensional, nonlinear dynamical
models with observed data. Despite their widespread usage in climate science
and oil reservoir simulation, very little is known about the long-time behavior
of these methods and why they are effective when applied with modest ensemble
sizes in large dimensional turbulent dynamical systems. By following the basic
principles of energy dissipation and controllability of filters, this paper
establishes a simple, systematic and rigorous framework for the nonlinear
analysis of EnKF and ESRF with arbitrary ensemble size, focusing on the
dynamical properties of boundedness and geometric ergodicity. The time uniform
boundedness guarantees that the filter estimate will not diverge to machine
infinity in finite time, which is a potential threat for EnKF and ESQF known as
the catastrophic filter divergence. Geometric ergodicity ensures in addition
that the filter has a unique invariant measure and that initialization errors
will dissipate exponentially in time. We establish these results by introducing
a natural notion of observable energy dissipation. The time uniform bound is
achieved through a simple Lyapunov function argument, this result applies to
systems with complete observations and strong kinetic energy dissipation, but
also to concrete examples with incomplete observations. With the Lyapunov
function argument established, the geometric ergodicity is obtained by
verifying the controllability of the filter processes; in particular, such
analysis for ESQF relies on a careful multivariate perturbation analysis of the
covariance eigen-structure.
