Environmental applications of sensitivity analysis

From HandWiki

Together with Earth sciences and Engineering, Environmental sciences have the largest number of academic articles including or dealing with sensitivity analysis [1]. Environmental computer models are increasingly used in a wide variety of studies and applications. For example, global climate models are used for both short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate change. Moreover, computer models are increasingly used for environmental decision-making at a local scale, for example for assessing the impact of a waste water treatment plant on a river flow, or for assessing the behavior and life-length of bio-filters for contaminated waste water. Similarly, sensitivity analyses can be used to evaluate the effect of demographic and environmental variables on the viability of populations to guide wildlife management[2] or assess the effect of global population on the projected extension of irrigated areas.[3]

In either case, sensitivity analysis may help to understand the contribution of the various sources of uncertainty to the model output uncertainty and the system performance in general. In these cases, depending on model complexity, different sampling strategies may be advisable and traditional sensitivity indices have to be generalized to cover multiple model outputs,[4] heteroskedastic effects and correlated inputs.[5].

References

  1. Saltelli, A.; Aleksankina, K.; Becker, W.; Fennell, P.; Ferretti, F.; Holst, N.; Li, S.; Wu, Q. (2019). "Why so many published sensitivity analyses are false: A systematic review of sensitivity analysis practices". Environ. Model. Softw 114: 29–39. doi:10.1016/J.ENVSOFT.2019.01.012. 
  2. Manlik, O.; Lacy, R.C.; Sherwin, W.B. (2018). "Applicability and limitations of sensitivity analyses for wildlife management". Journal of Applied Ecology 55 (3): 1430–1440. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.13044. 
  3. Puy, A.; Lo Piano, S.; Saltelli, A. (2020). "Current Models Underestimate Future Irrigated Areas". Geophysical Research Letters 47 (8). doi:10.1029/2020GL087360. 
  4. Fassò, Alessandro (2006). "Sensitivity Analysis for Environmental Models and Monitoring Networks". Preprint. http://www.iemss.org/iemss2006/papers/s7/268_Fasso_0.pdf. 
  5. Tavakoli, Siamak; Mousavi, Alireza (2013). "Event tracking for real-time unaware sensitivity analysis (EventTracker)". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 25 (2): 348–359. doi:10.1109/tkde.2011.240. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8690.