Inverse source problems with reduced interior data for a coupled reaction-diffusion system

Abstract

We consider a two-component semilinear reaction-diffusion system in a bounded spatial domain $Ω$ over a time interval $(0,T)$, which governs the water density $u(x,t)$ and the vegetation biomass density $v(x,t)$ for $x\inΩ$ and $0<t<T$. In this system, called the Klausmeier-Gray-Scott model, we assume that an unknown source depends only on the spatial variable and appears in the reaction-diffusion equation for $u$. The main subject is the inverse source problem of determining a source term from limited data on $(u,v)$. We establish two kinds of stability estimates by means of Carleman estimates. First, a Carleman estimate with a singular weight yields a Lipschitz stability estimate for the inverse source problem from data consisting of a snapshot $u(\cdot,t_0)$ in $Ω$ and $(u,v)$ in a subdomain $ω$ over a time interval. Second, without assuming boundary data, we prove a Hölder stability estimate in any interior subdomain $Ω_0$ satisfying $\overline{Ω_0}\subsetΩ$. We further study how much the observation data can be reduced while preserving uniqueness and stability in the inverse problem under suitable additional conditions.