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Seminar: Mike Dowd

Statistics Seminar Series
November 12, 2015
All Day
Cockins Hall (CH), Room 240

Title

Data Assimilation for Ocean Biology

Speaker

Mike Dowd, Dalhousie University

Abstract

New marine observation technologies and dynamical models are improving our understanding of the ocean. A major challenge is identifying and developing statistical approaches that can efficiently and effectively combine the large-scale, nonlinear, spatio-temporal numerical ocean models (that encapsulate our mechanistic understanding of the system) with the wide variety of available data types (e.g. time series, spatial imagery, time-space transects). This problem is termed data assimilation in the ocean and atmospheric sciences. In this talk, I explore the data assimilation in the context of ocean biology. My focus is mainly on lower trophic levels (the planktonic ecosystem or marine biogeochemistry), but I will also discuss some work with higher trophic levels (fisheries and marine mammals). I argue that Bayesian approaches and state space models provide a unifying framework for state and parameter estimation for such systems, including the treatment of model identification and sampling design. Challenges and potential new statistical directions are emphasized.