Simulation of strongly non-Gaussian processes using Karhunen-Loeve expansion

The non-Gaussian Karhunen-Loeve (K-L) expansion is very attractive because it can be extended readily to non-stationary and multi-dimensional fields in a unified way. However, for strongly non-Gaussian processes, the original procedure is unable to match the distribution tails well. This paper proposes an effective solution to this tail mismatch problem using a modified orthogonalization technique that reduces the degree of shuffling within columns containing empirical realizations of the K-L random variables. Numerical examples demonstrate that the present algorithm is capable of matching highly non-Gaussian marginal distributions and stationary/non-stationary covariance functions simultaneously to a very accurate degree. The ability to converge correctly to an abrupt lower bound in the target marginal distributions studied is noteworthy.