Determination of the insolation function in the nonlinear Sellers climate model

Abstract

We are interested in the climate model introduced by Sellers in 1969 which takes the form of some nonlinear parabolic equation with a degenerate diffusion coefficient. We investigate here some inverse problem issue that consists in recovering the so-called insolation function. We not only solve the uniqueness question but also provide some strong stability result, more precisely unconditional Lipschitz stability in the spirit of the well-known result by Imanuvilov and Yamamoto (1998) [22]. The main novelties rely in the fact that the considered model is degenerate and above all nonlinear. Indeed we provide here one of the first result of Lipschitz stability in a nonlinear case.