Costa a Problem Solving Environment for Data Assimilation

This paper presents COSTA, a Problem Solving Environment for data assimilation and model calibration. Different data assimilation techniques have been developed and implemented over the years. Unfortunately it is very hard to reuse these implementations and quickly try out new methods. COSTA offers a modular framework for data assimilation and model calibration, containing methods and tools that can be easily applied to general applications. Using COSTA, the application of data assimilation methods is simplified so they become available to a larger group of researchers and application areas. The developed parts like models and methods can be reused and interchanged when COSTA is used. While COSTA is being developed, its concepts and implementations are already applied in the software systems WAQUA and TRIWAQ for 2D and 3D shallow water simulation of the Dutch National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management (Rijkswaterstaat/RIKZ). The preliminary results of this application and the collaboration with the DATools project of WL|Delft Hydraulics are also presented in this paper.