Estimating Sea Floor Dynamics in the Southern North Sea to Improve Bathymetric Survey Planning

A statistical way to describe a surface in space is by specifying the expected value and variance at each point, and their mutual covariances. The surface is assumed to consist of a trend function and a residual function. The covariances between those points are expressed in a covariance function, based on the residual function. An application of the covariance function is Kriging, an interpolation procedure that propagates the variances and covariances of the data points to variances of the interpolated values. This approach is used widely for spatial analyses, like the interpolation of a bathymetric data set.