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A composite L 1 parameter estimator for model fitting in groundwater flow and solute transport simulation
Author(s) -
Xiang Y.,
Sykes J. F.,
Thomson N. R.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/93wr00097
Subject(s) - aquifer , groundwater flow , estimator , groundwater , hydraulic conductivity , finite element method , groundwater model , flow (mathematics) , groundwater flow equation , norm (philosophy) , mathematics , soil science , geotechnical engineering , geology , statistics , geometry , thermodynamics , physics , political science , law , soil water
This paper proposes a composite L 1 parameter estimator to solve the inverse problems in groundwater flow and solute transport modeling. The estimator is formulated using a weighted L 1 norm as the error measure between the vector of the observed hydraulic heads and solute concentrations and the corresponding vector of the heads and concentrations computed from a finite element model for steady state groundwater flow and solute transport in a two‐dimensional areal confined aquifer system. The parameters currently considered are the hydraulic conductivities, the dispersivities, the porosities of the aquifer system, and the solute source concentration(s). The gradients of the state variables with respect to the parameters are computed analytically using a formulation stemming from the finite element model for the state variables. The solutions to two hypothetical groundwater parameter estimation problems are presented to illustrate that the proposed estimator does have the property of being fairly accurate and, more significantly, being robust in handling observation data containing certain outliers.