An accurate strategy to retrieve multiple source emissions in the atmosphere

Abstract

Abstract We propose a new methodology to retrieve multiple point emission sources in the atmosphere. To allow more realistic modelling, the dispersion problem is solved by a stabilized finite element formulation. The simultaneous estimation of the source strengths, their locations and the total number of sources is made employing Tikhonov-type regularization, with a composite data misfit function. The corresponding minimization of the Tikhonov-type functional is carried out by a combination of a splitting strategy algorithm with a gradient-descent method. We illustrate the accuracy of the proposed technique by using Fusion Field Trials 2007 (FFT07) data.