On Visualization for Assessing Kriging Outcomes

Extant opinion about kriging is that all weights should be positive. Visualizations rendered by converting kriged grids to digital images are presented to show that negative weights may be beneficial to some spatial problems. In particular, variogram models with zero-valued nuggets, already well known to minimize smoothing through kriging, result in a visual resolution substantially superior to that from kriging with a variogram model having a nonzero nugget value in application to satellite acquired data. Negative weights are more likely when using variogram models with zero-valued nuggets, but resultant visualizations often show a smoother transition between extreme data values. This is true even when a variogram model having a nugget value of zero is not optimum with respect to mean square error, as is demonstrated using a nitrate data set. An analogy to digital image processing is used to suggest that the influence of negative weights in kriging is similar to a high-boost kernel.