Rao-Blackwell dimension reduction applied to hazardous source parameter estimation

Parameter estimation of a source of chemical, biological or radiological emissions is a problem of great importance for public safety. The key parameters of interest are the source intensity and its location. This paper applies the concept of Rao-Blackwell dimension reduction to solve the posterior probability distribution function of source intensity, conditioned on source location, analytically. The paper is cast in the context of a source of a hazardous release of particles or gas and its turbulent transport through the medium. Numerical results, obtained by simulations and using an experimental dataset, demonstrate the statistical efficiency of the proposed method.