Detecting and quantifying sources of non-stationarity via experimental semivariogram modeling

Conventional geostatistics often relies on the assumption of second order stationarity of the random function (RF). Generally, local means and local variances of the random variables (RVs) are assumed to be constant throughout the domain. Large scale differences in the local means and local variances of the RVs are referred to as trends. Two problems of building geostatistical models in presence of mean trends are: (1) inflation of the conditional variances and (2) the spatial continuity is exaggerated. Variance trends on the other hand cause conditional variances to be over-estimated in certain regions of the domain and under-estimated in other areas. In both cases the uncertainty characterized by the geostatistical model is improperly assessed. This paper proposes a new approach to identify the presence and contribution of mean and variance trends in the domain via calculation of the experimental semivariogram. The traditional experimental semivariogram expression is decomposed into three components: (1) the mean trend, (2) the variance trend and (3) the stationary component. Under stationary conditions, both the mean and the variance trend components should be close to zero. This proposed approach is intended to be used in the early stages of data analysis when domains are being defined or to verify the impact of detrending techniques in the conditioning dataset for validating domains. This approach determines the source of a trend, thereby facilitating the choice of a suitable detrending method for effective resource modeling.