Geostatistical approaches to refinement of digital elevation data

Data refinement refers to the processes by which a dataset’s resolution, in particular, the spatial one, is refined, and is thus synonymous to spatial downscaling. Spatial resolution indicates measurement scale and can be seen as an index for regular data support. As a type of change of scale, data refinement is useful for many scenarios where spatial scales of existing data, desired analyses, or specific applications need to be made commensurate and refined. As spatial data are related to certain data support, they can be conceived of as support-specific realizations of random fields, suggesting that multivariate geostatistics should be explored for refining datasets from their coarser-resolution versions to the finer-resolution ones. In this paper, geostatistical methods for downscaling are described, and were implemented using GTOPO30 data and sampled Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data at a site in northwest China, with the latter’s majority grid cells used as surrogate reference data. It was found that proper structural modeling is important for achieving increased accuracy in data refinement; here, structural modeling can be done through proper decomposition of elevation fields into trends and residuals and thereafter. It was confirmed that effects of semantic differences on data refinement can be reduced through properly estimating and incorporating biases in local means.