Development of an efficient and accurate global space-time radial basis collocation model for estimation of river pollution source

Pollution source estimation is an active research area nowadays. Researchers are trying to estimate the pollution source based on a set of data from monitoring sites. This kind of problems is known to be ill-posted and sensitive to computational errors. In this paper, we present a method using a space-time radial basis function to estimate the pollution source. To overcome the problem of ill-conditioning, we first use the data from the monitoring site to get a continuous approximation of the data. Then, we use this data together with the governing equation, and boundary conditions to set up an over-determined system of equations. The single value decomposition is used to get the least square solution. An example is used to illustrate the method. It is found that our method is effective and accurate in estimating the pollution source.