IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics Advance Access published online on December 14, 2007
IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics, doi:10.1093/imamat/hxm057
A procedure for the reconstruction of a stochastic stationary temperature field

School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Email: b.t.johansson{at}bham.ac.uk
Received on June 4, 2007; Accepted on October 8, 2007
An iterative procedure is proposed for the reconstruction of a temperature field from a linear stationary heat equation with stochastic coefficients, and stochastic Cauchy data given on a part of the boundary of a bounded domain. In each step, a series of mixed well-posed boundary-value problems are solved for the stochastic heat operator and its adjoint. Well-posedness of these problems is shown to hold and convergence in the mean of the procedure is proved. A discretized version of this procedure, based on a Monte Carlo Galerkin finite-element method, suitable for numerical implementation is discussed. It is demonstrated that the solution to the discretized problem converges to the continuous as the mesh size tends to zero
Keywords: finite element; ill posed; Karhunen–Loève expansion; stochastic elliptic equation.