English

Large-time uniqueness in a data assimilation problem for Burgers' equation

Optimization and Control 2012-07-20 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

There is currently a great deal of interest in the 4D-Var data assimilation scheme, in which one uses observational data to find the optimal initial condition for a differential equation by minimizing a cost function over the set of all possible initial states. For nonlinear models this cost function can be nonconvex, and so the uniqueness of minimizers is not guaranteed. In this paper we apply 4D-Var to Burgers' equation and prove that, once a sufficient amount of data has been collected, there can be at most one physically reasonable minimizer to the variational problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.4782,
  title  = {Large-time uniqueness in a data assimilation problem for Burgers' equation},
  author = {Graham Cox},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.4782},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

8 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:38:42.643Z