Improved estimation of pollutant emission rate in an ocean pollutant diffusion model by the application of spline interpolation with the adjoint method

Abstract

The spline interpolation method is applied to the inversion of the time-varying pollutant emission rate based on an ocean pollutant diffusion model with the adjoint method. A series of numerical experiments are performed to compare the spline interpolation with the Cressman interpolation. Experimental results show that the spline interpolation improves the inversion results in terms of the smoothness and accuracy. Furthermore, it is the advantages of spline interpolation-better resistance to the impact of errors and demand for fewer observations-that give rise to a better performance in practice.