Data assimilation for conservation laws (Q871864)

Data assimilation is important in meteorology and oceanography because it is a way to improve the models with newly measured data, statically or dynamically. It is a type of inverse problem for which the most popular solution method is least square with regularization and optimal control algorithm. In this paper the authors investigate the differentiated equation of some systems of conservation laws and show that the calculus of variation can be applied in a formal and rigorous manner provided that the principal values are defined at shocks and the equations are written in the sense of distribution theory. Numerical illustrations are given for the control of shocks for Burgers' equation and for the shallow water equations in one space dimension.