Evaluating the impact of the inflation factors generation for the ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation
The ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation (ES-MDA) gained much attention as a powerful parameter estimation method. The main idea of the ES-MDA is to assimilate the same data multiple times with an inflated data covariance data error. In the original ES-MDA implementation, these inflation factors, such as the number of assimilations, are selected a priori. The only requirement is that the sum of the inflation factors’ inverses must be equal to one. Therefore, selecting them equal to the number of assimilations is a straightforward choice. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown a relationship between the ES-MDA update equation and the solution to a regularized inverse problem. Hence, the inflation factors play the role of the regularization parameter at each ES-MDA assimilation step. As a result, they have also suggested new procedures to generate these elements based on the discrepancy principle. Although several studies proposed efficient techniques to generate the ES-MDA inflation factors, an optimal procedure to generate them remains an open problem. Moreover, the studies diverge on which regularization scheme is sufficient to provide the best ES-MDA outcomes. Therefore, in this work, we address the problem of generating the ES-MDA inflation factors and their influence on the method’s performance. We present a numerical analysis of the influence of such factors on the main parameters of the ES-MDA, such as the ensemble size, the number of assimilations, and the ES-MDA vector of model parameters update. With the conclusions presented in the aforementioned analysis, we propose a new procedure to generate ES-MDA inflation factors based on a regularizing scheme for Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms. It is shown through a synthetic two-dimensional waterflooding problem that the new method achieves better model parameters and data match compared to the other ES-MDA implementations available in the literature