The adjoint approach is a variational method which is often applied to data assimilation widely in meteorology and oceanography. It is used for analyses on observing optimization for the wind-driven Sverdrup circulation. The adjoint system developed by Thacker and Long (1992), which is based on the GFDL Byran-Cox model, includes three components, i. e. the forward model, the adjoint model and the optimal algorithm. The GFDL Byran-Cox model was integrated for a long time driven by a batch of ideal wind stresses whose meridional component is set to null and zonal component is a sine function of latitudes in a rectangle box with six vertical levels and 2 by 2 degree horizontal resolution. The results are regarded as a "real" representative of the wind-driven Sverdrup circulation, from which the four dimensional fields are allowed to be sampled in several ways, such as sampling at the different levels or along the different vertical sections. To set the different samples, the fields of temperature, salinity and velocities function as the observational limit in the adjoint system respectively where the same initial condition is chosen for 4D VAR data assimilation. By examining the distance functions which measure the misfit between the circulation field from the control experiment of the adjoint system with a complete observation and those from data assimilation of adjoint approach in these sensitivity experiments respectively, observing optimizations for the wind-driven Sverdrup circulation will be suggested under a fixed observational cost.