Sparse Solution of High-Dimensional Model Calibration Inverse Problems under Uncertainty in Prior Structural Connectivity

Data limitation and heterogeneity of the geologic formations introduce significant uncertainty in predicting the related flow and transport processes in these environments. Fluid flow and displacement behavior in subsurface systems is mainly controlled by the structural connectivity models that create preferential flow pathways (or barriers). The connectivity of extreme geologic features strongly constrains the evolution of the related flow and transport processes in subsurface formations. Therefore, characterization of the geologic continuity and facies connectivity is critical for reliable prediction of the flow and transport behavior. The goal of this study is to develop a robust and geologically consistent framework for solving large-scale nonlinear subsurface characterization inverse problems under uncertainty about geologic continuity and structural connectivity. We formulate a novel inverse modeling approach by adopting a sparse reconstruction perspective, which involves two major components: 1) sparse description of hydraulic property distribution under significant uncertainty in structural connectivity and 2) formulation of an effective sparsity-promoting inversion method that is robust against prior model uncertainty. To account for the significant variability in the structural connectivity, we use, as prior, multiple distinct connectivity models. For sparse/compact representation of high-dimensional hydraulic property maps, we investigate two methods. In one approach, we apply the principle component analysis (PCA) to each prior connectivity model individually and combine the resulting leading components from each model to form a diverse geologic dictionary. Alternatively, we combine many realizations of the hydraulic properties from different prior connectivity models and use them to generate a diverse training dataset. We use the training dataset with a sparsifying transform, such as K-SVD, to construct a sparse geologic dictionary that is robust to structural variability in the dataset. To solve the resulting inverse problem, we minimize a sparsity-regularized least-squares data mismatch function. This formulation of the inverse problem is inspired by recent advances in sparse reconstruction and the compressed sensing paradigm. We use several numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and their applicability to high-dimensional model calibration inverse problems.