APPLICATION OF THE CUMULATED FUNCTION TO THE PROCESSING OF CHRONOLOGICAL DATA IN OCEANOGRAPHY

This work is a transposition of a method used in the industrial contro l technique, to the study of the chronological data in oceanography. A t first the calculation consists of substracting a reference value fro m the data, then these residuals are successively added forming a cumu lative function. The graph of this function gives directly dates, inte nsity and duration of any changes. After a simulation, we applied this method to abundance of the copepod Acartia bifilosa, recorded from 19 78 to 1991 in Gironde estuary. This processing could be very useful in order to compare several oceanographic coastal time series, as is the fundamental aim of the program PNOC (Programme National d'Oceanograph ie Cotiere, thema ''Long term series'').