Currently BFAR has 27 monitoring stations along the coast of Manila Bay.The one of the Bureau's concern at the moment is to cut back on expenses by pruning out of these stations ones that are redundant.
The
goal of this project therefore is to reduce the total cost in resources
that this institution is using without giving away the reliability and
consistency of their data or without paralyzing the capability of their
stations to successfully monitor the starting occurrences of possible red-tide
phenomenon. We are then faced with a 3-fold problem of (1) reducing the
number of stations that are required to monitor a certain area and reveal
deficiencies with respect to the number of stations and their respective
positions, (2) identifying primary and secondary monitoring stations to
limit monitoring overhead to the primary stations first and then to the
secondary stations upon occurrence of red-tide, and (3) given some new
data gathered from a number of stations, to be able to identify stations
that should be taken into consideration in monitoring a possible red-tide
outbreak.