PhD student: Elise Wissenaekens, Thesis director: Katell Guizien
Thesis defended the 19th of January 2022
To give sound management advice, the connectivity in coastal areas must be thoroughly understood. The red thread throughout this PhD is analysing the uncertainty of the SYMPHONIE2015 model and its effect on larval dispersal simulations. In the first chapter, the robustness of the model to assumption violation was tested. This was done by calculating six relative and absolute statistical indicators during and outside of wind, wave and stratification events. The results showed that the model’s performance is not affected by these events. In the second chapter, the instant error was calculated. Then, the cumulative error distributions were compared to each other in space and time. In time, the intraseasonal differences in error distributions were smaller than the interseasonal ones. In space, eight groups of error distributions could be formed. No link was found between the model’s performance and stratification, water depth, resolution and bathymetry slope. However, a strong correlation between the current speed and the error distributions was found. In chapter three, the instant error was added as noise to the Lagrangian dispersal simulations and compared to the original run to assess the effect of the models’ error on connectivity. The median difference in transfer rate between the runs with and without noise around zero. However, the relative difference in transfer rate can vary from -100% to 100%. Knowing the uncertainties in dispersal simulations can aid in using them for management advice.
The assessment of the uncertainty of the hydrodynamical SYMPHONIE2015 model and its implications for Lagrangian dispersal studies
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