Devin Francom, Bruno Sanso, Vera Bulaevskaya, Donald Lucas
06/02/2017 03:26 PM
Applied Mathematics & Statistics
An atmospheric release of hazardous material, whether accidental or intentional, can be catastrophic for those in the path of the plume. Predicting the path of a plume based on characteristics of the release (location, amount and duration) and meteorological conditions is an active research area highly relevant for emergency and long-term response to these releases. As a result, researchers have developed particle dispersion simulators to provide plume path predictions that incorporate release characteristics and meteorological conditions. However, since release characteristics and meteorological conditions are often unknown, the inverse problem is of great interest, that is, based on all the observations of the plume so far, what can be inferred about the release characteristics? This is the question we seek to answer using plume observations from a controlled release at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Central California. With access to a large number of evaluations of an expensive particle dispersion simulator that includes continuous and categorical inputs and spatio-temporal output, building a fast statistical surrogate model (or emulator) presents many statistical challenges, but is an essential tool for inverse modeling. We achieve accurate emulation using Bayesian adaptive splines to model weights on empirical orthogonal functions. We use this emulator as well as appropriately identifiable simulator discrepancy and observational error models to calibrate the simulator, thus finding a posterior distribution of characteristics of the release. Since the release was controlled, these characteristics are known, making it possible to compare our findings to the truth.
