• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.581-593
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• 2006

Various geological thematic maps have been generated by interpolating sparsely sampled ground survey data and geostatistical kriging that can consider spatial correlation between neighboring data has widely been used. This paper applies multi-variate geostatistical algorithms to integrate secondary information with sparsely sampled ground survey data for geological thematic mapping. Simple kriging with local means and kriging with an external drift are applied among several multi-variate geostatistical algorithms. Two case studies for spatial mapping of groundwater level and grain size have been carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of multi-variate geostatistical algorithms. A digital elevation model and IKONOS remote sensing imagery were used as secondary information in two case studies. Two multi-variate geostatistical algorithms, which can account for both spatial correlation of neighboring data and secondary data, showed smaller prediction errors and more local variations than those of ordinary kriging and linear regression. The benefit of applying the multi-variate geostatistical algorithms, however, depends on sampling density, magnitudes of correlation between primary and secondary data, and spatial correlation of primary data. As a result, the experiment for spatial mapping of grain size in which the effects of those factors were dominant showed that the effect of using the secondary data was relatively small than the experiment for spatial mapping of groundwater level.