Calibration of an Ecosystem Model

• Activity Number: 575
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Xian He*+ and Hao Zhang and Qianlai Zhuang
• Companies: and Purdue University and Purdue University
• Keywords: calibration ; dynamic ; emulator ; Terrestrial ecosystem model

Abstract

An ecosystem model is a representation of the real complex ecological system, and is usually described by sophisticated mathematical models. Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM) is one of the ecosystem models, that describes the dynamics of carbon, nitrogen, soil, water and other vegetation related variables. To run such a model, not only the input variables have to be provided but some parameters need to be decided too. Calibration refers to the process of determining these parameters to that the model output in some sense best represents the observations. Data assimilation methods and Bayesian calibration methods are the two widely adopted approaches. However, when the model output is a vector with cross correlated elements as in the TEM, there are additional computational challenges to apply these methods. In this talk, we present an efficient calibration method for dynamic computer model with application to TEM.