Kriging and Bilinear Methods for Estimating Spatial Pattern of Atmospheric Pollutants

Two statistical methods to reconstruct the spatial pattern ofenvironmental data are compared: the Kriging and the Bilinear.The comparison is performed by evaluating two differentcharacteristics of the methods: the interpolation and the estimation. The Kriging method is demonstrated to be better thanthe Bilinear regarding all the statistics studied, although thedifferences are not very significant. Especially, the Kriging ismore efficient than the Bilinear in the reconstruction of peakvalues and it does not extrapolate local trends. The methods areapplied to a set of environmental data measured in an urban area.