Selecting a global optimization method to estimate the oceanic particle cycling rate constants

摘要

The objective is to select an inverse method to estimate the parameters of a dynamical model of the oceanic particle cycling from in situ data. Estimating the parameters f a dynamical model is a nonlinear inverse problem, even in the case of linear dynamics. Generally, biogeochemical models are characterized by complex nonlinear dynamics and by a high sensitivity to their parameters. This makes the parameter estimation problem strongly nonlinear. We show that an approach based on a linearization around an a priori solution and on a gradient descent method is not appropriate given the complexity of the related cost functions and our poor a priori knowledge of the parameters.