An understanding of natural coastal hazards is essential for improving resilience of coastal communities. Effective management of coastal hazards relies on prediction tools and mitigation structures that have been designed to handle the dynamic coastal system. This dissertation is a collection of manuscripts that cover a diverse range of fundamental...
One's ability to determine the cause and effect nature events is important for navigating within the social realm. However, the ability to determine these relationships is not always as clear. According to Weary and Edwards (1996) causal uncertainty (CU) is the result of an individual perceiving themselves as someone who...
The problem of handling dependent evidence is an important practical issue for applications of reasoning with uncertainty in artificial intelligence. The existing solutions to the problem are not satisfactory because of their ad hoc nature, complexities, or limitations. In this dissertation, we develop a general framework that can be used...
This dissertation investigates the problem of uncertainty in complex ecological models. The term "complex" is used to convey both the common and scientific meanings. Increasingly, ecological models have become complex because they are more complicated; ecological models are generally multi-variate and multi-leveled in structure. Many ecological models are complex because...
Under today's environmental conditions and with the increasing worldwide competition for water, errors in irrigation management decisions can be costly. Therefore, providing both accurate evapotranspiration estimation on a daily basis and estimation of the magnitude of error associated with this estimate is vital for informed water management decisions that allow...
Despite its promise as a potentially beneficial new source of energy, the ocean-based renewable energy industry is still in its infancy, and like any new idea there are many unknowns with the potential to affect both people and our natural environments. A permit for marine renewable energy (MRE) must cut...
Density dependence is an ecological concept concerning the mechanisms of change in the size of a population. The inability to census ecological populations confounds approaches to identify and quantify the level of density dependence. Statistical tests which ignore the presence of measurement error tend to result in misspeci fied type...
This thesis presents a novel approach for propagation of uncertainty in river systems. Errors in data observations and predictions (e.g., stream inflows), in model parameters, and resulting from the discretization of continuous systems, all point to the need to accurately quantify the amount of uncertainty carried through the modeling process....
The Lyapunov direct method is utilized to determine the
robustness bounds for nonlinear, time-variant uncertainies
p[subscript i]. Determination of the robustness bounds consists of two
principal steps: (i) generation of a Lyapunov function and
(ii) determination of the bounds based on the generated
Lyapunov function. Presently in robustness investigations,
a...
This study is intended to investigate and propose a systematic method for uncertainty quantification for the computer code validation application. Uncertainty quantification has gained more and more attentions in recent years. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires the use of realistic best estimate (BE) computer code to follow the rigorous...