Geostatistical interpolation by quantile kriging

The widely applied geostatistical interpolation methods of ordinary kriging (OK) or external drift kriging (EDK) interpolate the variable of interest to the unknown location, providing a linear estimator and an estimation variance as measure of uncertainty. The methods implicitly pose the assumption of Gaussianity on the observations, which is not given for many variables. The resulting "best linear and unbiased estimator" from the subsequent interpolation optimizes the mean error over many realizations for the entire spatial domain and, therefore, allows a systematic under-(over-)estimation of the variable in regions of relatively high (low) observations. In case of a variable with observed time series, the spatial marginal distributions are estimated separately for one time step after the other, and the errors from the interpolations might accumulate over time in regions of relatively extreme observations.