Abstract. We present a method to control unbalanced fast dynamics in an ensemble Kalman filter by introducing a weak constraint on the imbalance in a spatially sparse observational network. We show that the balance constraint produces significantly more balanced analyses than ensemble Kalman filters without balance constraints and than filters implementing incremental analysis updates (IAU). Furthermore, our filter with the weak constraint on imbalance produces good rms error statistics which outperform those of ensemble Kalman filters without balance constraints for the fast fields.