Don Edwards, Carl Miller and Megan Meece

Department of Statistics

University of South Carolina


" Cyclicity in Water Quality Indicators at National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) Sites "

The National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) is a network of 22 estuarine reserves; each reserve has two monitoring sites. Five measures of water quality (two dissolved oxygen measures, salinity, temperature, and depth) have been collected at these 44 sites via autosamplers every half-hour, and in some cases every fifteen minutes, since 1996. Our charge this year, under support of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been to quantify and compare the periodicity in these 220 time series, most of length exceeding 50,000 records. The work is still in progress. In this seminar, we discuss interactive graphical tools we have developed for examining the raw data series, and harmonic regression approaches to the analysis. Besides the sheer size of the data sets, modeling these series has been complicated by the presence of "deployment effects" (autosamplers must be replaced approximately every two weeks; the data signal often changes dramatically upon deployment of the new autosampler). This work is also joint with Fred Holland and Elizabeth Wenner of the SC Dept. of Natural Resources.


Back to Colloquium Series