Geostatistics and Analysis of Spatial Data

This note deals with geostatistical measures for spatial correlation, namely the auto-covariance function and the semi-variogram, as well as deterministic and geostatistical methods for spatial interpolation, namely inverse distance weighting and kriging. Some semi-variogram models are mentioned, specifically the spherical, the exponential and the Gaussian models. Equations to carry out simple og ordinary kriging are deduced. Other types of kriging are mentioned, and references to international literature, Internet addresses and state-of-the-art software in the field are given. A very simple example to illustrate the computations and a more realistic example with height data from an area near Slagelse, Denmark, are given. Finally, a series of attractive characteristics of kriging are mentioned, and a simple sampling strategic consideration is given based on the dependence of the kriging variance of distance and direction to the nearest observations.