Evaluation of Bayesian source estimation methods with Prairie Grass observations and Gaussian plume model: A comparison of likelihood functions and distance measures

•Slice sampling is introduced to solve Bayesian source estimation problems.•Approximate Bayesian Computation method is applied to source estimation problems.•Five likelihood functions are evaluated using field experiment data sets.•Six distance measures are evaluated using field experiment data sets.•Nemenyi test is used to evaluate all the methods over multiple data sets.

Source term estimation for atmospheric dispersion deals with estimation of the emission strength and location of an emitting source using all available information, including site description, meteorological data, concentration observations and prior information. In this paper, Bayesian methods for source term estimation are evaluated using Prairie Grass field observations. The methods include those that require the specification of the likelihood function and those which are likelihood free, also known as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods. The performances of five different likelihood functions in the former and six different distance measures in the latter case are compared for each component of the source parameter vector based on Nemenyi test over all the 68 data sets available in the Prairie Grass field experiment. Several likelihood functions and distance measures are introduced to source term estimation for the first time. Also, ABC method is improved in many aspects. Results show that discrepancy measures which refer to likelihood functions and distance measures collectively have significant influence on source estimation. There is no single winning algorithm, but these methods can be used collectively to provide more robust estimates.