Is para.proc.age1_haul=[0] used in the parameter files?

[leewujung]

Not sure if para.proc.age1_haul=[0] is used for some years or whether it is functional for some years but not the others.

Meeting notes:

• BL: proc_parameters_2019.m/para.proc.age1_haul=[0]: is this actually used?
• RT: but not sure why age-1 is excluded?
• BL: not an issue for 2019 data, but wondering if this has ever been edited specifically, or just that age-1 trawls are associated with specific strata
• RT: will try to look at the age1_haul in this parameter script
• BL: would like to understand this for all years

Tagging @rebeccathomas-NOAA @brandynlucca

[rebeccathomas-NOAA]

The two places I saw the actual para.proc.age1_haul variable be set to anything other than empty or 0 were:
(1) proc_parameters_2011

• have para.proc.age1_haul=[1 7 9 11:13 15 26 ];
  (2) get historic strata data
• line 60, sets some hauls for 2015 under certain conditions (e.g. INPFC stratification and para.proc.stratification_index=0)
  • para.proc.age1_haul = [4 9 10 13 15 18 23 30 35 39 41 48 60 69 227];

Observations:
(1) 2010 and 2014 were big hake year classes, so we would have seen lots of age-1's in 2011 and 2015, so Chu may have felt it was necessary to exclude age-1's those years but not earlier years.
(2) He only excluded the age-1 hauls in 2015 when looking using INPFC strata. 2015 was the year with the most age-1's mingled in with adults, and this could have had a big impact on the INPFC estimate if age-1's were not consistently removed.

Thoughts:
I think Chu was running into some problems with age-1's that he was dealing with only when he saw them. I also speculate that as Chu developed EchoPro, he dealt with age-1's in more sophisticated ways (like allowing whether or not age-1s were included to be set with a flag, as the current version has). But that back in 2015, when Chu was bringing EchoPro together as a program, he didn't have that flag in use yet.