Data Assimilation in hydrology: Variational Approach
Résumé
Predicting the evolution of the components of the water cycle is an important issue both from the scientific and social points of view. The basic problem is to gather all the available information in order to be able to retrieve at best the state of the water cycle. Among some others methods variational methods have a strong potential to achieve this goal. In this paper we will present applications of variational methods to basic problems in hydrology: retrieving the hydrologic state of at a location optimizing the parametrization of hydrologic models and doing sensitivity analysis. The examples will come from surface water as well as underground water. Perspectives of the application of variational methods are discussed.