Direct Problem for Gas Diffusion in Polar Firn with Variable Coefficients
Incremental extension of a mathematical model for climate scientists studying gas trapping in ice cores.
The paper extends a previous model of gas trapping in polar firn by allowing both the diffusion coefficient and volume fraction to vary, and proves existence and uniqueness of solutions using weighted Sobolev spaces and a finite element method.
We consider the mathematical model of gas trapping in deep polar ice (firns), which consists of a parabolic partial differential equation, that can degenerate at one boundary extreme. In [1], we considered all the coefficients to be constants, except the diffusion coefficient D(z) that is to be reconstructed. In this paper, we assume both the diffusion coefficient D(z) and the volume fraction f(z) are functions. The difficulty in this problem, both theoretically and computationally, arises from the fact that D(z) and f(z) may be zero at bottom of the firn. To handle such degeneracy, we defined appropriate weighted Sobolev spaces and used Lion's theorem to prove existence and uniqueness of the semi-variational formulation of the Firn PDE. A full discrete system is obtained through a P1 Finite element Galerkin procedure in space and an Euler-Implicit scheme in time. Sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the solution for the discrete system are obtained.