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Uncertainty is inherent in predictive decision-making, both with respect to forecasting plausible future conditions based on a historic record, and with respect to backcasting likely upstream states from downstream observations. In the first chapter, I evaluated the status of current water resources management policy in the United States (U.S.) with

Uncertainty is inherent in predictive decision-making, both with respect to forecasting plausible future conditions based on a historic record, and with respect to backcasting likely upstream states from downstream observations. In the first chapter, I evaluated the status of current water resources management policy in the United States (U.S.) with respect to its integration of projective uncertainty into state-level flooding, drought, supply and demand, and climate guidance. I found uncertainty largely absent and discussed only qualitatively rather than quantitatively. In the second chapter, I turned to uncertainty in the interpretation of downstream observations as indicators of upstream behaviors in the field of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE), which has made possible the near real-time, yet anonymous, monitoring of public health via measurements of biomarkers excreted to wastewater. I found globally, seasonality of air and soil temperature causes biomarker degradation to vary up to 13-fold over the course of a year, constituting part of the background processes WBE must address, or detrend, prior to decision-making. To determine whether the seasonal change in degradation rates was introducing previously unaccounted for uncertainty with respect to differences in observed summertime and winter-time populations, I evaluated demographic indicators recorded by the Census Bureau for correlation with their distance from all major wastewater treatment plants across the U.S. The analysis identified statistically significant correlation for household income, education attainment, unemployment, military service, and the absence of health insurance. Finally, the model was applied to a city-wide case study to test whether temperature could explain some of the trends observed in monthly observations of two opiate compounds. Modeling suggests some of the monthly changes were attributed to natural temperature fluctuation rather than to trends in the substances’ consumption, and that uncertainty regarding discharge location can dominate even relative observed differences in opiate detections. In summary, my work has found temperature an important modulator of WBE results, influencing both the type of populations observed and the likelihood of upstream behaviors disproportionally magnified or obscured, particularly for the more labile biomarkers. There exists significant potential for improving the understanding of empirical observations via numerical modeling and the application of spatial analysis tools.
ContributorsHart, Olga (Author) / Halden, Rolf (Thesis advisor) / Mascaro, Giuseppe (Committee member) / Renaut, Rosemary (Committee member) / Nelson, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Tikhonov regularization for projected solutions of large-scale ill-posed problems is considered. The Golub{Kahan iterative bidiagonalization is used to project the problem onto a subspace and regularization then applied to nd a subspace approximation to the full problem. Determination of the regularization, parameter for the projected problem by unbiased predictive risk

Tikhonov regularization for projected solutions of large-scale ill-posed problems is considered. The Golub{Kahan iterative bidiagonalization is used to project the problem onto a subspace and regularization then applied to nd a subspace approximation to the full problem. Determination of the regularization, parameter for the projected problem by unbiased predictive risk estimation, generalized cross validation, and discrepancy principle techniques is investigated. It is shown that the regularized parameter obtained by the unbiased predictive risk estimator can provide a good estimate which can be used for a full problem that is moderately to severely ill-posed. A similar analysis provides the weight parameter for the weighted generalized cross validation such that the approach is also useful in these cases, and also explains why the generalized cross validation without weighting is not always useful. All results are independent of whether systems are over- or underdetermined. Numerical simulations for standard one-dimensional test problems and two- dimensional data, for both image restoration and tomographic image reconstruction, support the analysis and validate the techniques. The size of the projected problem is found using an extension of a noise revealing function for the projected problem [I. Hn etynkov a, M. Ple singer, and Z. Strako s, BIT Numer. Math., 49 (2009), pp. 669{696]. Furthermore, an iteratively reweighted regularization approach for edge preserving regularization is extended for projected systems, providing stabilization of the solutions of the projected systems and reducing dependence on the determination of the size of the projected subspace.

ContributorsRenaut, Rosemary (Author)
Created2017-03-08