Joint identification of groundwater pollution source information, model parameters, and boundary conditions based on a novel ES-MDA with a wheel battle strategy

Groundwater pollution source identification (GPSI) is an important prerequisite for pollution remediation and risk assessment. However, an accurate GPSI is usually difficult to achieve due to the need to simultaneously consider practical problems and theoretical research. For practical problems, the boundary conditions, especially the concentration boundary, are often given as known constants through prior information. However, in most practical situations, the boundary conditions are complex and cannot be accurately estimated in advance, which leads to the distortion of the final identification results. Therefore, this study focused on the concentration boundary, and first proposed to jointly identify three types of unknown variables (source information, model parameters, and boundary conditions) to ensure that the identification results had more practical value. For theoretical research, as the number of unknown variable types increases, the difficulty of solving the inverse problem often increases, which may lead to inaccurate inversion results. Thus, a novel ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation (ES-MDA) with a wheel battle strategy was proposed, enhancing the identification accuracy. We designed two cases to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the above ideas: a low-dimensional Case 1 (including four different synthetic scenarios: three scenarios with unknown boundary conditions under three concentration boundary modes and a scenario with known boundary conditions) and a high-dimensional complex Case 2. Identifying the boundary conditions in GPSI was found to be of great significance. Compared to the standard ES-MDA method, the ES-MDA with a wheel battle strategy proposed here could improve the inversion accuracy, and had certain effectiveness and practicality.