Pre- and post-processing in quantum-computational hydrologic inverse analysis

Understand

It was recently shown that certain subsurface hydrological inverse problems -- here framed as determining the composition of an aquifer from pressure readings -- can be solved on a quantum annealer.

• However, the quantum annealer performance suffered when solving problems where the aquifer was composed of materials with vastly different permeability, which is often encountered in practice.
• In this paper, we study why this regime is difficult and use several pre- and post-processing tools to address these issues.
• This study has three benefits: it improves quantum annealing performance for real-world problems in hydrology, it studies the scaling behavior for these problems (which were previously studied at a fixed size), and it elucidates a challenging class of problems that are amenable to quantum annealers.