Reconstruction of an atmospheric tracer source using the principle of maximum entropy. II: Applications

A new method of performing the source inversion of a passive tracer at continental scale was proposed in Part I of this two-part paper. The method made use of prior information, general or specific (depending on the situation), to perform a better reconstruction using only the prior information and the field measurements of the tracer. In this paper the method is tested on its first applications. It is used on several test examples, using the meteorological conditions of the European Joint Research Centre ETEX-I campaign. The retrieval of a temporal profile of emission from a source whose location is known is studied before testing the method on a full reconstruction of the space-time profile of the source. Synthetic, but also real-measurement, inversions are tested, thanks to the extension of the formalism to noisy data.