Minimum acceptance criteria for geostatistical realizations

Geostatistical simulation is being used increasingly for numerical modeling of natural phenomena. The development of simulation as an alternative to kriging is the result of improved characterization of heterogeneity and a model of joint uncertainty. The popularity of simulation has increased in both mining and petroleum industries. Simulation is widely available in commercial software. Many of these software packages, however, do not necessarily provide the tools for careful checking of the geostatistical realizations prior to their use in decision-making. Moreover, practitioners may not understand all that should be checked. There are some basic checks that should be performed on all geostatistical models. This paper identifies (1) the minimum criteria that should be met by all geostatistical simulation models, and (2) the checks required to verify that these minimum criteria are satisfied. All realizations should honor the input information including the geological interpretation, the data values at their locations, the data distribution, and the correlation structure, within “acceptable” statistical fluctuations. Moreover, the uncertainty measured by the differences between simulated realizations should be a reasonable measure of uncertainty. A number of different applications are shown to illustrate the various checks. These checks should be an integral part of any simulation modeling work flow.