Direct and Inverse Problem for Gas Diffusion in Polar Firn

Abstract

Simultaneous use of partial differential equations in conjunction with data analysis has proven to be an efficient way to obtain the main parameters of various phenomena in different areas, such as medical, biological, and ecological. In the ecological field, the study of climate change (including global warming) over the past centuries requires estimating different gas concentrations in the atmosphere, mainly CO2. The mathematical model of gas trapping in deep polar ice (Firns) has been derived in [12, 15, 16, 17], consisting of a parabolic partial differential equation that is almost degenerate at one boundary extreme. In this paper, we consider all the coefficients to be constants, except the diffusion coefficient that is to be reconstructed. We present the theoretical aspects of existence, uniqueness and simulation for such direct problem and consequently formulate the inverse problem that attempts at recovering the diffusion coefficients using given generated data