Abstract
Identifying the heterogeneous conductivity field and reconstructing the
contaminant release history are key aspects of subsurface remediation.
Achieving these two goals with limited and noisy hydraulic head and
concentration measurements is challenging. The obstacles include solving
an inverse problem for high-dimensional parameters, and the
high-computational cost needed for the repeated forward modeling. We use
a convolutional adversarial autoencoder (CAAE) for the parameterization
of the heterogeneous non-Gaussian conductivity field with a
low-dimensional latent representation. Additionally, we trained a
three-dimensional dense convolutional encoder-decoder (DenseED) network
to serve as the forward surrogate for the flow and transport processes.
Combining the CAAE and DenseED forward surrogate models, the ensemble
smoother with multiple data assimilation (ESMDA) algorithm is used to
sample from the Bayesian posterior distribution of the unknown
parameters, forming a CAAE-DenseED-ESMDA inversion framework. We applied
this CAAE-DenseED-ESMDA inversion framework in a three-dimensional
contaminant source and conductivity field identification problem. A
comparison of the inversion results from CAAE-ESMDA with physical flow
and transport simulator and CAAE-DenseED-ESMDA is provided, showing that
accurate reconstruction results were achieved with a much higher
computational efficiency.