Department
Home Page
About Us:
• Contact Info.
• Faculty
• Staff
• Teaching Assistants
Academic Program:
• Admission
• Undergraduate
• Graduate
• Certificates
Courses:
• Course Description
• Class Web Pages
• Class Syllabi
Research:
• Colloquium
• Interdisciplinary Seminar
• Seminars
• Steve Goldman Lectures in Mathematical Physics
Links:
| • Completing Online GEP Courses |
| • Best Jobs |
| • Newsletter |
| • Math Lab |
| •Math Placement Test |
| • Careers |
| • American Mathematical Society |
| • Mathematical Association of America |
01/27/04 Colloquium
DR. IAN McKEAGUE
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
A Statistical Approach to Ocean Circulation Inverse Problems
Abstract: Tracer data collected during the past century has formed the basis for our understanding of ocean circulation. Yet a description of the steady flow in the oceanic interior that is dynamically consistent with those observations and that accounts for the inherent uncertainty associated with measurements and model parameterizations is still lacking. A feature of existing ocean circulation inverse methods is a preprocessing stage in which the tracer data are interpolated over a regular grid and the interpolation error is ignored in the subsequent inversion. This talk introduces a statistical inversion approach based on a quasi-horizontal flow model and a PDE solver for the forward problem of computing solutions to the tracer field advection-diffusion equations. The approach only uses interpolated data at grid points that have neighboring hydrographic stations, and by exploiting physically based models in an integrated fashion, provides a statistically unified inversion and tracer field reconstruction with minimal preprocessing. The approach is used to reconstruct the quasi-horizontal flow for an abyssal neutral density layer in the South Atlantic.