Kriging

The concept of a regionalized variable was introduced in Chapter 4 as a naturally occuring

property that has characteristics intermediate between a truly random variable and one that is
completely deterministic. Many geological surfaces, both real and conceptual, can be regarded as
regionalized variables. These surfaces are continuous from place to place and hence must be
spatially correlated over short to be statistically independent. The degree of spatial continuity of a
regionalized variable can be expressed by a semivariogram. If measurements have been made at
scattered sampling points and the form of the semivariogram is known, it is possible to estimate the
value of the surface at any unsampled location. The estimation procedure is called kriging, a South
Arican mining engineer and pioneer in the application of statistical techniques to mine evaluation.

Kriging can be used to make contour maps, but unlike conventional contouring algotihms, it
has certain statocally optimal properties. Perhaps most importantly,