Week 8

Hard to believe it's almost over. Well this week was all about continuing to gather the data for the model and then playing with the model. I went ahead and set up the model in MATLAB such that I can call it with different sets of parameters very easily and have been running multiple sets of parameters each day. What's difficult is that there isn't any actual data out there for the growth of the elements of the model we have over a long period of time, so we don't necessarily have any data to use to try and calibrate our model (with a Monte Carlo simulation most likely). So really we just have a few things to go on: phytoplankton (cryptophytes) should preceed zooplankton (Myrionecta rubra) and the blooms should start and end at particular times during the year (mid march - early august if I remember off the top of my head).

What's disheartening is that we found out too late that these cryptophytes can take ages to grow; the ones we're working with right now for this have been growing for two weeks and haven't reached the exponential growth phase just yet. It makes me wish we could go back in time just so we could start everything sooner.