Parameter Identification and Inverse Problems in Hydrology, Geology and Ecology

The Workshop on Parameter Identification and Inverse Problems in Hydrology, Geology and Ecology, Karlsruhe, April 10-12, 1995, was organized to bring to- gether an interdisciplinary group drawn from the areas of science, engineering and mathematics for the following purposes: - to promote, encourage and influence more understanding and cooperation in the community of parameter identifiers from various disciplines, - to forge unity in diversity by bringing together a variety of disciplines that attempt to understand the reconstruction of inner model parameters, un- known nonlinear constitutive relations, heterogeneous structures inside of geological objects, sources or sinks from observational data, - to discuss modern regularization tools for handling improperly posed pro- blems and strategies of incorporating a priori knowledge from the applied problem into the model and its treatment. These proceedings contain some of the results of the workshop, representing a bal- anced selection of contributions from the various groups of participants. The reviewed invited and contributed articles are grouped according to the broad headings of hydrology, non-linear diffusion and soil physics, geophysical methods, mathematical analysis of inverse and ill-posed problems and parallel algorithms for inverse problems. Some of the issues adressed by the articles in these proceedings include the rela- tion between least squares and direct formulations of inverse problems for partial differential equations, nonlinear regularization, identification of nonlinear consti- tutive relations, fast parallel algorithms for large scale inverse problems, reduction of model structures, geostatistical inversion techniques.