Abstract. Data assimilation transfers information from an observed system to a physically based model system with state variables x(t). The observations are typically noisy, the model has errors, and the initial state x(t 0 ) is uncertain: the data assimilation is statistical. One can ask about expected values of functions G(X) on the path X = {x(t 0 ), . . ., x(t m )} of the model state through the observation window t n = {t 0 , . . ., t m }. The conditional (on the measurements) probability distribution P (X) = exp[−A 0 (X)] determines these expected values. Variational methods using saddle points of the "action" A 0 (X), known as 4DVar (Talagrand and Courtier, 1987;Evensen, 2009), are utilized for estimating G(X) . In a path integral formulation of statistical data assimilation, we consider variational approximations in a realization of the action where measurement errors and model errors are Gaussian. We (a) discuss an annealing method for locating the path X 0 giving a consistent minimum of the action A 0 (X 0 ), (b) consider the explicit role of the number of measurements at each t n in determining A 0 (X 0 ), and (c) identify a parameter regime for the scale of model errors, which allows X 0 to give a precise estimate of G(X 0 ) with computable, small higher-order corrections.