Adaptive estimation of the log fluctuating conductivity from tracer data at the Cape Cod Site

An adaptive estimation scheme is used to obtain the integral scale and variance of the log‐fluctuating conductivity at the Cape Cod site based on the fast Fourier transform/stochastic model of Deng et al. (1993) and a Kalmanlike filter. The filter incorporates prior estimates of the unknown parameters with tracer moment data to adaptively obtain improved estimates as the tracer evolves. The results show that significant improvement in the prior estimates of the conductivity can lead to substantial improvement in the ability to predict plume movement. The structure of the covariance function of the log‐fluctuating conductivity can be identified from the robustness of the estimation. Both the longitudinal and transverse spatial moment data are important to the estimation.