Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSDEDP Sciences Résumé : International audience Modelling environmental problems leads to mathematical systems with missing data. For instance, weather problems have generally missing initial conditions. The paper is concerned with identifying pollution terms arising in the state equation of some dissipative system with incomplete initial condition. To this aim the so-called sentinel method is used. Here, the problem of determining a sentinel is equivalent to a null-controllability problem for which Carleman inequalities are revisited. ISSN: 1270-900X