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Ensemble-based data assimilation methods have recently become popular for solving reservoir history matching problems, but because of the practical limitation on ensemble size, using localization is necessary to reduce the effect of sampling error and to increase the degrees of freedom for incorporating large amounts of data. Local analysis in the ensemble Kalman filter has been used extensively for very large models in numerical weather prediction. It scales well with the model size and the number of data and is easily parallelized. In the petroleum literature, however, iterative ensemble smoothers with localization of the Kalman gain matrix have become the state-of-the-art approach for ensemble-based history matching. By forming the Kalman gain matrix row-by-row, the analysis step can also be parallelized. Localization regularizes updates to model parameters and state variables using information on …