Benchmarking in subsurface hydrological inversion: high-fidelity reference solution and EnKF replication data

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Description:

Dataset published with the paper "Towards a community-wide effort for benchmarking in subsurface hydrological inversion: benchmarking cases, high-fidelity reference solutions, procedure and a first comparison". You can use these data to generate the comparisons between the EnKF and the MCMC solution as seen in the paper.

Folder structure & Nomenclature:

• Each folder with reference data starts with "ref_", followed by the scenario identifier like for S0, "ref_S0". See the scenario description below for further explanation.
  • In each of the reference folders, the several MCMC chains are stored. Please refer to the publication for further information about the file.
• Each folder with solutions that are not references, but just replications, start with "rep_", like for the S0 steady state EnKF, "rep_EnKF_S01".
  • In these folders, the datafiles including the solutions are stored. 
  • For your own references, we recommend creating your own folder called "rep_YourFolderName_ScenarioSpecifier".

Scenario description:

• S0 is the base case. It features a relatively strong degree of heterogeneity with σθ = 2, relatively accurate measurement data with σe = 0.05 [L], irregularly placed observations, and steady-state groundwater flow.
• S1 features the regular grid of observations instead of the random one. While irregular monitoring 375 networks are more realistic, the very close spacing of a few monitoring wells may pose a problem to some methods due to their high autocorrelation. Therefore, S1 is a fallback scenario.
• S2 is again like S0, but reduces the strength of heterogeneity from σθ = 2 to σθ = 1. While σθ = 2 is a more realistic degree of heterogeneity, it may already be challenging for methods that are explicitly or implicitly linearization-based. Therefore, S2 is a fallback scenario.
• S3 is again like S0, but increases the assumed level of observational errors from σe = 0.05 [L] to σe =0.1 [L]. Given the overall head difference of 20 [L] across the domain by the boundary conditions, these values can be classified as high and medium accuracy, respectively. Iterative or sampling-based methods may have problems with the accuracy requirement posed by the large accuracy in S0. Once again, S3 is a fallback solution. However, as posterior uncertainties will remain larger for smaller measurement accuracy, S3 may also trigger stronger non-linearities across the larger remaining postcalibration uncertainty ranges.
• S4 changes S0 to feature transient (instead of steady-state) groundwater flow. This is relevant for
  EnKF-type methods that work via transient data assimilation and that do not iterate.

Download and benchmarking: