The overarching goal of this collaborative project is to achieve greater understanding of the physical processes that control the circulation in the Gulf of Mexico, in particular the Loop Current and Loop Current eddy separation dynamics, through advanced data assimilative modeling and analyses. Our MSEAS group plans to: contribute to the skill assessment and analysis of the operational modeling systems; complete targeted multi-resolution modeling experiments to study the effect of model resolution, initial and boundary conditions; illustrate our capabilities of probabilistic predictability and process analyses to quantify variability due to initial/boundary conditions, predictability limits, predictive capabilities, and mutual information and causality metrics between Gulf and LC variables; and, predict the information content and impacts of observations for principled observational campaign design.