We propose a differential geometric construction for families of low-rank covariance matrices, via interpolation on low-rank matrix manifolds. In contrast with standard parametric covariance classes, these families offer significant flexibility for problem-specific tailoring via the choice of "anchor" matrices for the interpolation. Moreover, their low-rank facilitates computational tractability in high dimensions and with limited data. We employ these covariance families for both interpolation and identification, where the latter problem comprises selecting the most representative member of the covariance family given a data set. In this setting, standard procedures such as maximum likelihood estimation are nontrivial because the covariance family is rank-deficient; we resolve this issue by casting the identification problem as distance minimization. We demonstrate the power of these differential geometric families for interpolation and identification in a practical application: wind field covariance approximation for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation.

When balanced truncation is used for model order reduction, one has to solve a pair of Lyapunov equations for two Gramians and uses them to construct a reduced-order model. Although advances in solving such equations have been made, it is still the most expensive step of this reduction method. Parametric model order reduction aims to determine reduced-order models for parameter-dependent systems. Popular techniques for parametric model order reduction rely on interpolation. Nevertheless, the interpolation of Gramians is rarely mentioned, most probably due to the fact that Gramians are symmetric positive semidefinite matrices, a property that should be preserved by the interpolation method. In this contribution, we propose and compare two approaches for Gramian interpolation. In the first approach, the interpolated Gramian is computed as a linear combination of the data Gramians with positive coefficients. Even though positive semidefiniteness is guaranteed in this method, the rank of the interpolated Gramian can be significantly larger than that of the data Gramians. The second approach aims to tackle this issue by performing the interpolation on the manifold of fixed-rank positive semidefinite matrices. The results of the interpolation step are then used to construct parametric reduced-order models, which are compared numerically on two benchmark problems.