Books on the topic 'Spatial interpolation'

The climate system consists of interactions between physical, biological, chemical, and human processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Characterizing the behavior of components of this system is crucial for scientists and decision makers. There is substantial uncertainty associated with observations of this system as well as our understanding of various system components and their interaction. Thus, inference and prediction in climate science should accommodate uncertainty in order to facilitate the decision-making process. Statistical science is designed to provide the tools to perform inference and prediction in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, the field of spatial statistics considers inference and prediction for uncertain processes that exhibit dependence in space and/or time. Traditionally, this is done descriptively through the characterization of the first two moments of the process, one expressing the mean structure and one accounting for dependence through covariability.Historically, there are three primary areas of methodological development in spatial statistics: geostatistics, which considers processes that vary continuously over space; areal or lattice processes, which considers processes that are defined on a countable discrete domain (e.g., political units); and, spatial point patterns (or point processes), which consider the locations of events in space to be a random process. All of these methods have been used in the climate sciences, but the most prominent has been the geostatistical methodology. This methodology was simultaneously discovered in geology and in meteorology and provides a way to do optimal prediction (interpolation) in space and can facilitate parameter inference for spatial data. These methods rely strongly on Gaussian process theory, which is increasingly of interest in machine learning. These methods are common in the spatial statistics literature, but much development is still being done in the area to accommodate more complex processes and “big data” applications. Newer approaches are based on restricting models to neighbor-based representations or reformulating the random spatial process in terms of a basis expansion. There are many computational and flexibility advantages to these approaches, depending on the specific implementation. Complexity is also increasingly being accommodated through the use of the hierarchical modeling paradigm, which provides a probabilistically consistent way to decompose the data, process, and parameters corresponding to the spatial or spatio-temporal process.Perhaps the biggest challenge in modern applications of spatial and spatio-temporal statistics is to develop methods that are flexible yet can account for the complex dependencies between and across processes, account for uncertainty in all aspects of the problem, and still be computationally tractable. These are daunting challenges, yet it is a very active area of research, and new solutions are constantly being developed. New methods are also being rapidly developed in the machine learning community, and these methods are increasingly more applicable to dependent processes. The interaction and cross-fertilization between the machine learning and spatial statistics community is growing, which will likely lead to a new generation of spatial statistical methods that are applicable to climate science.

This article focuses on the use of a spatio-temporal mixture model for mapping malaria in the Amazon rain forest. The spatio-temporal model was developed to study malaria outbreaks over a four year period in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. The goal is to predict malaria counts for unobserved municipalities and future time periods with the aid of a free-form spatial covariance structure and a methodology that allows temporal prediction and spatial interpolation for outbreaks of malaria over time. The proposed structure is unique in that it is not a distance- or neighbourhood-based covariance model. Instead, spatial correlation is allowed among all locations to be estimated freely. To model the temporal correlation between observations, a Bayesian dynamic linear model is incorporated into one level of the spatio-temporal mixture model. The model also provides sensible ways of malaria mapping for municipalities which were not observed.

This chapter discusses a distortion in the perception of straightness not with reference to a line but to a contour formed by a sequence of aligned angles, such as those forming the borders of Chinese lanterns. An outline contour may appear to deviate from straightness when the contrast sign along the contour inverts. These local distortions may be observed with a jagged contour as well. This chapter provides some demonstrations in which regular rectangles contoured by a sawtooth borders appear to periodically contract/expand in synch with the phases of luminance variation of surfaces or borders. To explain these phenomena, we need to call into cause a large spatial range of interpolation of the local distortions along the contour.

Measurements in and just below the plant root zone, using principles of soil physics, can be used to estimate recharge. This booklet describes the Zero Flux Plane Method, Methods Based on Darchy's law, and Lysimetry for making such estimates. The work presents the basic concepts of soil water physics that will be referred to in this and other booklets in the series. Another method, the Soil Water Flux Meter, is discussed briefly, but as this is not sufficiently well developed for routine use readers are referred elsewhere for full details. All these methods require that consideration be given to interpolation over time and spatial extrapolation or averaging. A brief discussion of this is given.