A Fictitious Time Integration Method for Backward Advection-Dispersion Equation

The backward advection-dispersion equation (ADE) for identifying the groundwater pollution source identification problems (GPSIPs) is numerically solved by employing a fictitious time integration method (FTIM). The backward ADE is renowned as ill-posed because the solution does not continuously count on the data. We transform the original parabolic equation into another parabolic type evolution equation by introducing a fictitious time coordinate, and adding a viscous damping coefficient to enhance the stability of numerical integration of the discretized equations by employing a group preserving scheme. When several numerical examples are amenable, we find that the FTIM is applicable to retrieve all past data very well and is good enough to deal with heterogeneous parameters. Even under seriously noisy final data, the FTIM is also robust against disturbance.