Application of ensemble transform data assimilation methods for parameter estimation in reservoir modelling

Abstract: Over the years data assimilation methods have been developed to obtain estimations of uncertain model parameters by taking into account a few observations of a model state. The most reliable methods of MCMC are computationally expensive. Sequential ensemble methods such as ensemble Kalman filers and particle filters provide a favourable alternative. However, Ensemble Kalman Filter has an assumption of Gaussianity. Ensemble Transform Particle Filter does not have this assumption and has proven to be highly beneficial for an initial condition estimation and a small number of parameter estimation in chaotic dynamical systems with non-Gaussian distributions. In this paper we employ Ensemble Transform Particle Filter (ETPF) and Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (ETKF) for parameter estimation in nonlinear problems with 1, 5, and 2500 uncertain parameters and compare them to importance sampling (IS). We prove that the updated parameters obtained by ETPF lie within the range of an initial ensemble, which is not the case for ETKF. We examine the performance of ETPF and ETKF in a twin experiment setup and observe that for a small number of uncertain parameters (1 and 5) ETPF performs comparably to ETKF in terms of the mean estimation. For a large number of uncertain parameters (2500) ETKF is robust with respect to the initial ensemble while ETPF is sensitive due to sampling error. Moreover, for the high-dimensional test problem ETPF gives an increase in the root mean square error after data assimilation is performed. This is resolved by applying distance-based localization, which however deteriorates a posterior estimation of the leading mode by largely increasing the variance. A possible remedy is instead of applying localization to use only leading modes that are well estimated by ETPF, which demands a knowledge at which mode to truncate.