The principal investigator will study a stochastic description of mass transport on fluid flows. The model is none of birth and death on a stochastic flow, originating in the work of Cinlar and Kao. The aim is to develop a Girsanov transformation for this model as needed in likelihood estimation. He will then implement this idea in the context of transient tracers on fluid flows. In addition, he will explore the implications of these results for the adaptive sampling of fluid flows where the goal is to estimate drift rates and other parameters. The transport of materials by fluid flows is of interest in many scientific fields. For example, oceanographers study the movements of drifters and chemical tracers in learning about ocean currents. In this project, the principal investigator will study probability models for such transport. In this context he will address problems of statistical inference such as forecasting the spread of materials on ocean flows. The results should be of interest to scientists working with transport problems.
