Geostatistics for Engineers and Earth Scientists

Ricardo A. Olea

Engineers and earth scientists are increasingly interested in quantitative methods for the analysis, interpretation, and modeling of data that imperfectly describe natural processes or attributes measured at geographical locations. Inference from imperfect knowledge is the realm of classical statistics. In the case of many natural phenomena, auto- and cross- correlation preclude the use of classical statistics. The appropriate choice in such circumstances is geostatistics, a collection of numerical techniques for the characterization of spatial attributes similar to the treatment in time series analysis of auto-correlated temporal data. As in time series analysis, most geostatistical techniques employ random variables to model the uncertainty that goes with the assessments. The applicability of the methods is not limited by the physical nature of the attributes. Geostatistics for...