The STAMP Software for State Space Models

This paper reviews the use of STAMP (Structural Time Series Analyser, Modeler and Predictor) for modeling time series data using state-space methods with unobserved components. STAMP is a commercial, GUI-based program that runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers as part of the larger OxMetrics System. STAMP can estimate a wide-variety of both univariate and multivariate state-space models, provides a wide array of diagnostics, and has a batch mode capability. The use of STAMP is illustrated for the Nile river data which is analyzed throughout this issue, as well as by modeling a variety of oceanographic and climate related data sets. The analyses of the oceanographic and climate data illustrate the breadth of models available in STAMP, and that state-space methods produce results that provide new insights into important scientific problems.

Oceanographic Weather Maps: Using Oceanographic Models to Improve Seabed Mapping Planning and Acquisition

In a world of high precision sensors, one of the few remaining challenges in multibeam echosounding is that of refraction based uncertainty. A poor understanding of oceanographic variability can lead to inadequate sampling of the water mass and the uncertainties that result from this can dominate the uncertainty budget of even state-of-the-art echosounding systems. Though dramatic improvements have been made in sensor accuracies over the past few decades, survey accuracy and efficiency is still potentially limited by a poor understanding of the “underwater weather”. Advances in the sophistication of numerical oceanographic forecast modeling, combined with ever increasing computing power, allow for the timely operation and dissemination of oceanographic nowcast and forecast model systems on regional and global scales. These sources of information, when examined using sound speed uncertainty analysis techniques, have the potential to change the way hydrographers work by increasing our understanding of what to expect from the ocean and when to expect it. Sound speed analyses derived from ocean modeling system’s three-dimensional predictions could provide guidance for hydrographers during survey planning, acquisition and post-processing of hydrographic data. In this work, we examine techniques for processing and visualizing of predictions from global and regional operational oceanographic forecast models and climatological analyses from an ocean atlas to better understand how these data could best be put to use to in the field of hydrograph

PICES Press, Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2012

•2011 PICES Science: A Note from the Science Board Chairman (pp. 1-6) •2011 PICES Awards (pp. 7-9) •Beyond the Terrible Disaster of the Great East Japan Earthquake (pp. 10-12) •A New Era of PICES-ICES Scientific Cooperation (p. 13) •New PICES Jellyfish Working Group Formed (pp. 14-15) •PICES Working Group on North Pacific Climate Variability (pp. 16-18) •Final U.S. GLOBEC Symposium and Celebration (pp. 19-25) •2011 PICES Rapid Assessment Survey (pp. 26-29) •Introduction to Rapid Assessment Survey Methodologies for Detecting Non-indigenous Marine Species (pp. 30-31) •The 7th International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions (pp. 32-33) •NOWPAP/PICES/WESTPAC Training Course on Remote Sensing Data Analysis (pp. 34-36) •PICES-2011 Workshop on “Trends in Marine Contaminants and their Effects in a Changing Ocean” (pp. 37-39) •The State of the Western North Pacific in the First Half of 2011 (pp. 40-42) •Yeosu Symposium theme sessions (p. 42) •The Bering Sea: Current Status and Recent Events (pp. 43-44) •News of the Northeast Pacific Ocean (pp. 45-47) •Recent and Upcoming PICES Publications (p. 47) •New leadership for the PICES Fishery Science Committee (p. 48

PICES Press, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 1997

WG 10 Fukuoka Workshop Pacific salmon:climate-linked long-term stock fluctuations The state of the eastern North Pacific in the second half of 1996 The state of the western North Pacific in the second half of 1996 The status of the Bering Sea in the second half of 1996 Yutaka Nagata Eulogy A brief look at mechanisms for support of oceanographic research in the United States Research interests and the funding system for the new Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of the Republic of Korea PICES and electronic communication Japan Meteorological Agency: oceanographic activitie

PICES Climate Change and Carrying Capacity Workshop on the Development of Cooperative Research in Coastal Regions of the North Pacific, October 17-18, 1997, Pusan, Republic of Korea

(PDF contains 53 pages

The International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) Version 3.0

[1] The International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) released its first gridded bathymetric compilation in 1999. The IBCAO bathymetric portrayals have since supported a wide range of Arctic science activities, for example, by providing constraint for ocean circulation models and the means to define and formulate hypotheses about the geologic origin of Arctic undersea features. IBCAO Version 3.0 represents the largest improvement since 1999 taking advantage of new data sets collected by the circum-Arctic nations, opportunistic data collected from fishing vessels, data acquired from US Navy submarines and from research ships of various nations. Built using an improved gridding algorithm, this new grid is on a 500 meter spacing, revealing much greater details of the Arctic seafloor than IBCAO Version 1.0 (2.5 km) and Version 2.0 (2.0 km). The area covered by multibeam surveys has increased from ∼6% in Version 2.0 to ∼11% in Version 3.0

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.

PICES Press, Vol. 11, No. 2, July 2003

Cover [pdf, 1.2 Mb] PICES Science Board and Governing Council hold their first joint meeting [pp. 1-3] [pdf, 0.2 Mb] 3rd International Zooplankton Production Symposium [pp. 4-7] [pdf, 0.6 Mb] The state of the eastern North Pacific entering spring 2003 [pp. 8-9] [pdf, 0.4 Mb] The state of the western North Pacific in 2002 [pp. 10-13] [pdf, 0.6 Mb] The Bering Sea: Current status and recent events [pp. 14-15] [pdf. 0.7 Mb] Patricia Livingston [pp. 16-19] [pdf. 0.5 Mb] Recent changes in the abundance of northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax) off the Pacific Northwest, tracking a regime shift? [pp. 20-21] [pdf. 0.6 Mb] Developing new scientific programs in PICES [pp. 22-26] [pdf. 0.2 Mb] Report of the Yokohama 2003 MODEL Task Team Workshop to develop a marine ecosystem model of the North Pacific Ocean including pelagic fishes [pp. 27-29] [pdf. 0.5 Mb] 3rd PICES Workshop on the Okhotsk Sea and adjacent Areas [pp.30-31] [pdf. 0.4 Mb] Recent oceanographic and marine environmental studies at FERHRI [pp.32-34] [pdf. 0.4 Mb] Symposium Announcement [p. 35] [pdf. 0.3 Mb] PICES announcements [p. 36] [pdf. 0.3 Mb

Modern Statistical Methods in Oceanography: A Hierarchical Perspective

Processes in ocean physics, air-sea interaction and ocean biogeochemistry span enormous ranges in spatial and temporal scales, that is, from molecular to planetary and from seconds to millennia. Identifying and implementing sustainable human practices depend critically on our understandings of key aspects of ocean physics and ecology within these scale ranges. The set of all ocean data is distorted such that three- and four-dimensional (i.e., time-dependent) in situ data are very sparse, while observations of surface and upper ocean properties from space-borne platforms have become abundant in the past few decades. Precisions in observations of all types vary as well. In the face of these challenges, the interface between Statistics and Oceanography has proven to be a fruitful area for research and the development of useful models. With the recognition of the key importance of identifying, quantifying and managing uncertainty in data and models of ocean processes, a hierarchical perspective has become increasingly productive. As examples, we review a heterogeneous mix of studies from our own work demonstrating Bayesian hierarchical model applications in ocean physics, air-sea interaction, ocean forecasting and ocean ecosystem models. This review is by no means exhaustive and we have endeavored to identify hierarchical modeling work reported by others across the broad range of ocean-related topics reported in the statistical literature. We conclude by noting relevant ocean-statistics problems on the immediate research horizon, and some technical challenges they pose, for example, in terms of nonlinearity, dimensionality and computing.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-STS436 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

PICES Press, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 1997

Highlights of PICES V Warren S. Wooster Interaction between the northern North Pacific and its marginal seas:Current activities of JAMSTEC in the PICES region What is CREAMS? The state of the eastern North Pacific in the first half of 1996 The state of the western North Pacific in the first half of 1996 TCODE Inventory of Long-term Time Series PICES New