Land-sea interface identification and submarine groundwater exchange (SGE) estimation

In this article we consider the problem of estimating submarine groundwater exchange quantities as an inverse problem in which the unknown is the location of the interface between the land and the sea, whereas overspecified boundary conditions are available on another part of the domain boundary. A data completion problem on a fictitious domain, which can be rather larger or smaller than the real one, is analyzed and the land-sea interface at the null hydraulic head isovalue is identified. Examples are given for different dimensions of the domain for a case of sea water intrusion and one of land water discharge. The sensitivity of the identification process to noisy data is considered.