A Study of the Transport of Marine Pollutants Using Adjoint Method of Data Assimilation with Method of Characteristics

Abstract

An adjoint method of data assimilation with the characteristic finite difference (CFD) scheme is applied to marine pollutant transport problems and the temporal and spatial distribution of marine pollutants are simulated. Numerical tests of two-dimensional problems of pollutant transport with two different schemes indicate that the error of CFD is smaller than that of central difference scheme (CDS). Then the inversion experiments of the initial field and the source and sink terms of pollutants are carried out. Applying CFD in the adjoint method of data assimilation cannot only reduce simulation error to get a good inversion but can also enable larger time step size to decrease computation time and improve the calculation efficiency.