Theme 4-12-Geostatistics - A brief look at its application in drainage management

Abstract

Many statistical tools are useful in developing qualitative insights into a wide variety of natural phenomena; many others can be used to develop quantitative answers to specific questions. Unfortunately, most classical statistical methods make no use of the spatial information in soil-water properties data sets. Geostatistics, as one tool of Spatial Information Technology (SIT), offers a way of describing the spatial continuity that is an essential feature of many natural phenomena and provides adaptations of classical regression techniques to take advantage of this continuity.

In view of the essential nature of subsurface drainage as a factor in the yield of farmlands in our struggle to produce food for our increasing population, it is important that any information about the theory and practice of drainage for agriculture be accurate. The management and design of drainage systems depend upon the reliability of the field measurements of soil-water properties that display a wide range of variability and classical statistical methods produce an incomplete description of this variability. Geostatistics recognizes these difficulties and provides the statistical tools for calculating the most accurate predictions of soil-water properties by making use of, yet powerful, tools for quantifying the accuracy of these predictions. It utilizes the fact that variations in soil-water properties are not always random, but have some spatial structures that may be expressed in a powerful mathematical form.

This article shows, in a brief look, how geostatistics could be one of the most effective tools for subsurface drainage management.