Customer Reviews

Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation (Applied Geostatistics Series)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I picked up this book so that I could understand a geostatisical model I was using for petroleum exploration, and it did a beautiful job of laying out the conceptual framework of the math. As a geologist with not so much mathematical background, I was able to pick through the equations and derivations (which I imagine would be useful for those so inclined) to get at the actual substance. This is a surprisingly readable text for a math book, highly recommended.

Please be aware that Dr Merk's comment reflects his views of *all* geostatistics that use random fields, variogram models etc. You can read his page to see his view (which I have never been able to figure out) and look at the AI-GEOSTATS archives for plenty of discussion. In Merks' view, the rest of us are either idiots, lemmings, or have been brainwashed; in most practioner's view, the sort of geostatistics taught in this book has proven to be very useful and seems theoretically-sound.

If you decide that this approach can give useful insight into the natural world (i.e. if you agree with 99% of current practicioners), and especially map and predict, than this book is a thorough, detailed treatment. The dataset is available from the author's home page and also comes with the gstat package of R, so the reader can practice all the techniques.

The sections on co-regionalization are especially strong.

Be aware the notation is somewhat non-standard but it works well, especially for complex co-regionalization equations.

This book is the one book one should consult in order to study and apply geostatistics. It is very comprehensive, clear and practical. It presents classical and innovative methods in geostatistics, some of them only now appearing in textbooks.

The book is at first out of reach because of the common notation. After three pages it became self explaining and incredibly usefull. I strongly recommend it to subjets new in geostatistics with a no very strong mathematical background.

Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation is another textbook that violates the requirement of functional independence and ignores the concept of degrees of freedom. This author is one of many who believes that the true variance of the distance-weighted average can be replaced with the pseudo kriging variance of a SET of degrees-of-freedom and variance-deprived functionally dependent kriged estimates formely known as distance-weighted averages. Degrees of freedom, too, are missing in this textbook, which seems to suggest that this concept is as redundant as the variance of the single distance-weighted average.