Abstract
Unconsolidated sediment cover thickness (D) above bedrock was estimated by
using a publicly available well database from Norway, GRANADA.
General challenges associated with such databases typically involve
clustering and bias. However, if information about the horizontal distance to
the nearest bedrock outcrop (L) is included, does the spatial estimation of
D improve? This idea was tested by comparing two cross-validation results:
ordinary kriging (OK) where L was disregarded; and co-kriging (CK)
where cross-covariance between D and L was included. The analysis showed
only minor differences between OK and CK with respect to differences
between estimation and true values. However, the CK results gave in general
less estimation variance compared to the OK results. All observations were
declustered and transformed to standard normal probability density functions
before estimation and back-transformed for the cross-validation analysis. The
semivariogram analysis gave correlation lengths for D and L of approx. 10
and 6 km. These correlations reduce the estimation variance in the
cross-validation analysis because more than 50 % of the data material had
two or more observations within a radius of 5 km. The small-scale variance
of D, however, was about 50 % of the total variance, which gave an
accuracy of less than 60 % for most of the cross-validation cases. Despite
the noisy character of the observations, the analysis demonstrated that L
can be used as secondary information to reduce the estimation variance of
D.
Citation
ID:
182158
Ref Key:
kitterd2017hydrologyestimating