The unscented Kalman inversion (UKI) presented in [1] is a general derivative-free approach to solving the inverse problem. UKI is particularly suitable for inverse problems where the forward model is given as a black box and may not be differentiable. The regularization strategy and convergence property of the UKI are thoroughly studied, and the method is demonstrated effectively handling noisy observation data and solving chaotic inverse problems. In this paper, we aim to make the UKI more efficient in terms of computational and memory costs for large scale inverse problems. We take advantages of the low-rank covariance structure to reduce the number of forward problem evaluations and the memory cost, related to the need to propagate large covariance matrices. And we leverage reduced-order model techniques to further speed up these forward evaluations. The effectiveness of the enhanced UKI is demonstrated on a barotropic model inverse problem with O($10^5$) unknown parameters and a 3D generalized circulation model (GCM) inverse problem, where each iteration is as efficient as that of gradient-based optimization methods.
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