Uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis of geoscientific predictions with data-driven approaches
Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.

Uncertainty quantification in the Earth Sciences forms an integral component in decision making. Such decision has different objectives depending on the subsurface system. For example, the goals include maximizing profits in exploitation of resources or minimizing the effects on the environment. It is often the case that the decision has to balance between multiple conflicting objectives. Because the decision is made on prediction uncertainty, it is crucial to quantify realistic uncertainty which necessitates identification of a variety of sources of model uncertainty. The sources of model uncertainty include different interpretations on subsurface structures and depositional scenarios, unknown spatial distributions of properties, uncertainty in boundary conditions, hydrological/hydraulic properties and errors in measurements. The subsurface system is parameterized to represent model uncertainty. The model variable can be either global (takes scalar value) or spatially distributed. With limited available data, a large number of uncertain model variables exists. One of key tasks is to quantify how each model variable contribute to response uncertainty, which can be achieved by means of sensitivity analysis. Sensitivity analysis plays an important role in geoscientific computer experiments, whether for forecasting, data assimilation or model calibration. Some methods of sensitivity analysis have been used in Earth Sciences but they have clear limitations -- they cannot efficiently deal with multivariate responses, excessive calculations are required, and it is hard to take into account categorical input uncertainty. Overcoming these limitations, we revisit the idea of regionalized sensitivity analysis. In particular, we focus on distance-based global sensitivity analysis to estimate sensitivities of multivariate responses with limited number of samples. We demonstrate how the results from sensitivity analysis can be utilized to reduce model uncertainty with minimal impact on response uncertainty. The results can be used to design second Monte Carlo or building a surrogate model. Uncertainty needs to be updated as more data are required from different sources. In a Bayesian framework, this requires sampling from a posterior density of model and prediction variables. The key components of the workflow are dimensionality reduction of data variables and building of a statistical surrogate model to replace full forward models. It is demonstrated that the methodology successfully performs model inversions with limited number of full forward model runs. In many geoscientific applications, both global and spatial variables are uncertain. For convenience in computations, spatial variables are often converted to a few global variables. Even if the approach is efficient, the inversion results may not be consistent with the stated geological prior which leads to unrealistic uncertainty. In this dissertation, we propose to extend direct forecasting to predict model variables themselves. It is shown that successful inversion can be performed with both global and spatial variables characterizing a field-scale subsurface system. All the methodologies are demonstrated with the case studies. The first case deals with an oil reservoir in Libya. The case is used to study the proposed methods for global sensitivity analysis and approaches for model inversions to integrate dynamic data. The second case deals with the groundwater reservoir in Denmark. The case is used to integrate different sources of data to offer the inputs of decision models for groundwater management.