Research Notes

Reading a Spatial Dengue Experiment Carefully

A guide to what a synthetic reaction–diffusion experiment can—and cannot—show about climate-sensitive transmission.

26 December 2025 · 1 min read

The project couples temperature-dependent mosquito dynamics to a spatial reaction–diffusion model. Its experiment matrix is synthetic: it supports comparisons under controlled assumptions, not a forecast for Macau or another specific city.

A small mathematical core

A spatial compartment can be written schematically as

It=DI2I+T(S,I,V,T)γI,\frac{\partial I}{\partial t}=D_I\nabla^2 I + \mathcal{T}(S,I,V,T)-\gamma I,

where diffusion represents local movement and T\mathcal{T} collects transmission terms that depend on hosts, vectors, and temperature. Long-range dispersal adds a nonlocal process.

How to read the output

The useful question is whether a comparison remains stable when resolution, step size, or uncertain parameters change. The repository therefore includes numerical verification, tests, and sensitivity runs. These establish implementation confidence; empirical calibration is a separate task.

# Reproduce the documented synthetic matrix inside the project environment
python run_experiment_matrix.py --tfinal 365 --grid 30 --dt 0.2 --save 30