Project background
The Australian Antarctic Division monitors the State of the Antarctic Environment. To facilitate this monitoring, the Australian Antarctic Data Centre has developed SIMR- a System for Indicator Management and Reporting. SIMR is a web-accessible database which monitors a number of environmental indicators. This system allows scientists to monitor changes in key Antarctic environmental factors.
Relationships between indicators
The State of the Environment is monitored via a number of indicators. Indicators are variables which represent key aspects of the Antarctic environment, such as atmospheric conditions, biodiversity, and human activities.
Many of these indicators are inter-related. Our analyses include identifying and modelling these relationships.
Example
- the fuel used to heat Antarctic stations is strongly influenced by the outside air temperature and wind conditions
- we have modelled this relationship using a simple feedforward neural network
- the figure below shows the actual (dotted black line) and predicted (red line) fuel usage at Mawson station
- the model shows that fuel usage has dropped by about 20% since 1995. This is due in part to efforts to reduce energy use at Antarctic stations
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| Model of fuel usage at Mawson station. Diagram: Ben Raymond |
- the modelled relationship between outside air temperature, wind speed, and fuel usage is shown below
- for an air temperature of -15ºC, fuel usage is approximately 50500 litres/month if winds are low (8 m/s, see red arrow below)
- the fuel usage increases by approximately 7% to 54000 litres/month if winds are high (15 m/s, see blue arrow below)
- this effect is similar to the chilling effect of wind on the human body
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| Neural network model of fuel usage at Mawson station. The model predicts fuel usage (shown by the coloured contour lines) from wind and air temperature data. Diagram: Ben Raymond |
Web page credits: Ben Raymond and Jeremy Bonnice, AAD
