ANR Geronimo
Advanced Geophysical Reduced-Order Model from Image
Observations
What is Geronimo?
Geronimo
is a research project funded by the National Agency of
Research, France. Its objective is the conception of new
techniques for the construction of geophysical
reduced-order models (ROMs) from image data. The project
both arises from the crucial need of accurate low-order
descriptions of highly-complex geophysical phenomena and
the recent numerical revolution which has supplied the
geophysical scientists with an unprecedented volume of
image data.
The precise characterization of geophysical phenomena is
a crucial need in many domains of everyday life and can
have a dramatic impact in many environmental and
economical fields. One can mention, among others, the
applications related to climate studies, oceanographic
analyses or meteorological forecasting which are of
paramount importance for the study of global warming,
etc. Unfortunately, the laws ruling such geophysical
processes depend on state variables evolving in huge
dimensional spaces and are thus totally intractable. In
this context, resorting to ROMs, gathering the main
features of geophysical systems into a few degrees of
freedom, is almost unavoidable.
The construction of relevant ROMs is a tricky problem
since it has to trade carefully between two
contradictory goals: decrease the complexity and
preserve the model accuracy. On top of that, the
construction of ROMs has often to cope with numerous
uncertainties on the system parameters (for example
unknown intricate boundary conditions or unknown model
parameters). These uncertainties are usually ignored in
the current literature, with possible dramatic
consequences.
The goal of the Geronimo project thus consists in
exploiting the information contained in the image data
to reduce the uncertainty on the unknown parameters of
the models and improve the accurracy of reduced-order
models.