Homework 4

Spatial interpolation contest

In 1997, the European Communities organized a Spatial Interpolation Comparison. Many different organizations participated with the results published in a special issue of the Journal of Geographic Information and Decision Analysis (Dubois, 1999) and a separate report (Dubois et al., 2003).

elev Figure 4. Digital elevation map of Switzerland.

The comparison used a dataset from rainfall measurements in Switzerland on the 8th of May 1986, the day of the Chernobyl disaster. Figure 4 shows the data area: the Digital Elevation Model of Switzerland with superimposed country's borders. A total of 467 rainfall measurements were taken that day. A randomly selected subset of 100 measurements was used as the input data the 1997 Spatial Interpolation Comparison in order to interpolate other measurements using different techniques and to compare the results with the known data. Figure 5 shows the spatial locations of the selected data samples and the full dataset.

raindata
Figure 5. Left: locations of weather stations used as input data in the spatial interpolation contest. Right: all weather stations locations.

In this assignment, you will try different techniques of spatial data interpolation and will participate in the interpolation contest.

Homework 4