The workshop on Uncertainty in Water Resource Management - Communicating and Optimising Model Uncertainty with PEST

I had the opportunity to attend four day course on uncertainty in modelling with PEST which was followed by 1,5 day workshop from 4th of April to 8thod April in Christchurch.  
The course was led by Dr. John Doherty, the developer of PEST. Course was very intensive hands-on modelling and performing uncertainty analysis. The course gave very useful and practical knowledge about modelling and related issues.

The 1.5 day was attended by 30 water resource scientists and managers from regional authorities, universities, research organisations and consultancies to better understand the reasons why predictions made by environmental models are often accompanied by wide margins of uncertainty.  Workshop presentations were given by Chris Daughney (GNS Science), John Doherty (Watermark Numerical Computing), Linda Lilburn (Landcare Research), Graham McBride (NIWA), Stephen McNeill (Landcare Research), Catherine Moore (GNS Science/ESR), David Scott (ESR), Shailesh Kumar Singh (NIWA) and Simon Woodward (Lincoln Agritech). Several talks focused on research around model simplification questions, for example: how simple can we go and still have a beneficial model and how can we check that such a model is suitable but there were also talks on how to communicate the modelling results most effectively to the public and policy makers. Presentations were followed by interesting discussion.
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand

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