High Frequency(HF) radar current data is assimilated into a shelf sea circulation model based on optimal interpolation(OI) method. The purpose of this work is to develop a real-time computationally highly efficient assimilation method to improve the forecast of shelf current. Since the true state of the ocean is not known, the specification of background error covariance is arduous. Usually, it is assumed or calculated from an ensemble of model states and is kept in constant. In our method, the spatial covariances of model forecast errors are derived from differences between the adjacent model forecast fields, which serve as the forecast tendencies. The assumption behind this is that forecast errors can resemble forecast tendencies, since variances are large when fields change quickly and small when fields change slowly. The implementation of HF radar data assimilation is found to yield good information for analyses. After assimilation, the root-mean-square error of model decreases significantly. Besides, three assimilation runs with variational observation density are implemented. The comparison of them indicates that the pattern described by observations is much more important than the amount of observations. It is more useful to expand the scope of observations than to increase the spatial interval. From our tests, the spatial interval of observation can be 5 times bigger than that of model grid. High frequency (HF) radar current data is assimilated into a shelf sea circulation model based on optimal interpolation (OI) method. The purpose of this work is to develop a real-time computationally highly efficient assimilation method to improve the forecast of shelf current. Usually, it is assumed or calculated from an ensemble of model states and is kept in constant. In our method, the spatial covariances of model forecast errors are derived from differences between the adjacent model forecast fields, which serve as the forecast tendencies. The assumption behind this is that forecast errors can resemble forecast tendencies, since variances are large when fields change quickly and small when fields change slowly. The implementation of HF radar data assimilation is found to yield good information for analyzes. After assimilation, the root-mean-square error of model less sigma The comparison of them indicates that the pattern described by observations is much more important than the amount of observations. It is more useful to expand the scope of observations than to increase the spatial interval. From our tests, the spatial interval of observation can be 5 times bigger than that of model grid.