Abstract
In this work, an inverse method to estimate the emission rate of a non-stationary point source that emits a pollutant into the atmosphere is presented. The method is formulated as a variational problem (Tikhonov-type regularization). Numerical examples of the emission rate estimation are analyzed using a one-dimensional version of the dispersion model. The inverse method can be applied both for a time series of the concentration of an atmospheric pollutant, that is, data collected in a monitoring station, as well as for concentration data distributed in a domain at a fixed time. The method estimates are different for these data sets. Satisfactory results are obtained in the recovery of the emission rate using time series, while the spatially distributed data are not viable to solve the inverse problem.