A stochastic collocation based Kalman filter for data assimilation

In this paper, a stochastic collocation-based Kalman filter (SCKF) is developed to estimate the hydraulic conductivity from direct and indirect measurements. It combines the advantages of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) for dynamic data assimilation and the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) for efficient uncertainty quantification. In this approach, the random log hydraulic conductivity field is first parameterized by the Karhunen–Loeve (KL) expansion and the hydraulic pressure is expressed by the PCE. The coefficients of PCE are solved with a collocation technique. Realizations are constructed by choosing collocation point sets in the random space. The stochastic collocation method is non-intrusive in that such realizations are solved forward in time via an existing deterministic solver independently as in the Monte Carlo method. The needed entries of the state covariance matrix are approximated with the coefficients of PCE, which can be recovered from the collocation results. The system states are updated by updating the PCE coefficients. A 2D heterogeneous flow example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the SCKF with respect to different factors, such as initial guess, variance, correlation length, and the number of observations. The results are compared with those from the EnKF method. It is shown that the SCKF is computationally more efficient than the EnKF under certain conditions. Each approach has its own advantages and limitations. The performance of the SCKF decreases with larger variance, smaller correlation ratio, and fewer observations. Hence, the choice between the two methods is problem dependent. As a non-intrusive method, the SCKF can be easily extended to multiphase flow problems.