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DARE Seminar: How remote sensing and big data are changing our view of the coast
May 2, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Join the ARC DARE Centre for in-person seminar at UNSW, followed by networking and nibbles!
Big Data, Big Dreams: How Remote Sensing and Big Data are Changing Our View of the Coast
Coastal science and engineering is a relatively young field and historically has lacked sufficient data to be able to understand how this complex earth system works at both large temporal and spatial scales. Yet, with a large portion of the world’s population living within 50km of the coastline, we are being asked to provide advice and understanding on how coastlines will change into the future.
This talk will first provide a bit of context on just how data sparse our field is, and how we are now engaging and rapidly trying to catch up to our hydrological colleagues. We will discuss how we are applying basic machine learning techniques to improve our ability to predict coastal change at a variety of timescales of interest to the public, from individual storms, to where the coast might be by 2100.
The talk will be aimed at a broadscale (non-expert) audience, discussing the challenges associated with trying to model the coastline, and the techniques we have so far applied, and we’d love thoughts and ideas from the audience as well.
Speakers: Associate Professor Kristen Splinter and Patrick ‘Kit’ Calcraft
Kristen is an ARC Future Fellow and Deputy Director of the Water Research Laboratory at UNSW Sydney. Her work encompasses a wide range of coastal topics examining sandy beach evolution from storms to multiple decades. She has developed a number of behavioural type numerical models to predict sandbar and shoreline evolution and the focus of her Fellowship will be to develop regional scale models for long-term shoreline prediction, along the embayed coastlines of NSW. She’s been dipping her toes into machine learning since about 2015 but her students are the real experts.
Kit is a DARE affiliated PhD candidate in his first year working on machine learning methods for shoreline prediction, including bridging the gap between physics and ML. He is co-supervised by Associate Professor Kristen Splinter, Dr Josh Simmons (DARE) and Professor Lucy Marshall. He will present an overview of what he’s been up to in year 1 of his PhD.