On numerical computation of sensitivity of response functions to system inputs in variational data assimilation problems

Abstract Prediction of pollution in water flow is a very important task. To this end, it is imperative to be able to define the uncertainty in a model prediction. This is the purpose of sensitivity analysis whose role is to identify what uncertainty in the model outputs is attributable to the model inputs (parameters in this case). Traditionally, this is achieved by running the model perturbed by many random samples in the parameter space to determine their impact on the model outputs. It provides information on how much of the output variance is controlled by each parameter of the inputs. The theoretical results related to the procedure based adjoint approach for computing a sensitivity of the response function (RF) to changes in the input source are presented in the paper. It is shown that this approach allows to compute, by one single integration of the adjoint equation over a given time interval, a sensitivity of the RF to any source located in the domain of interest. The proposed approach is applied to the 2D Saint-Venant flow equations for modelling the water pollution problem. A numerical experiment is formulated and implemented for the Thanh Nhan Lake in Hanoi for studying a sensitivity of some RF to observations. The numerical model is constructed by applying the well-known finite-volume method. Two appropriate optimization problems are introduced and solved on the basis of the BFGS algorithm. The numerical results show the efficiency of the proposed method and confirm the theoretical findings.