The identification of a time dependent sorption parameter from soil column experiments

K. Renee Fister, Maeve L. McCarthy and Seth F. Oppenheimer

Soil column studies are used frequently in seeking to understand the behavior of a particular contaminant in a saturated homogeneous soil of a given type. The concentration of the contaminant is modeled by a parabolic partial differential equation.We seek to identify the sorption partitioning coefficient as a function of time from limited boundary data. We discuss an output least squares formulation of the problem with Tikhonov regularization. We explicitly characterize a source condition that determines the rate of convergence of the method. Numerical examples are presented.