Semi-Idealized Study on Estimation of Partly and Fully Space Varying Open Boundary Conditions for Tidal Models

Two strategies for estimating open boundary conditions (OBCs) with adjoint method are compared by carrying out semi-idealized numerical experiments. In the first strategy, the OBC is assumed to be partly space varying and generated by linearly interpolating the values at selected feature points. The advantage is that the values at feature points are taken as control variables so that the variations of the curves can be reproduced by the minimum number of points. In the second strategy, the OBC is assumed to be fully space varying and the values at every open boundary points are taken as control variables. A series of semi-idealized experiments are carried out to compare the effectiveness of two inversion strategies. The results demonstrate that the inversion effect is in inverse proportion to the number of feature points which characterize the spatial complexity of open boundary forcing. The effect of ill-posedness of inverse problem will be amplified if the observations contain noises. The parameter estimation problems with more control variables will be much more sensitive to data noises, and the negative effects of noises can be restricted by reducing the number of control variables. This work provides a concrete evidence that ill-posedness of inverse problem can generate wrong parameter inversion results and produce an unreal “good data fitting.”