Kriging and bilinear methods for estimating spatial pattern of atmosphericpollutants

Two statistical methods to reconstruct the spatial pattern of environmental data are compared: the Kriging and the Bilinear. The comparison is perform ed by evaluating two different characteristics of the methods: the interpol ation and the estimation. The Kriging method is demonstrated to be better t han the Bilinear regarding all the statistics studied, although the differe nces are not very significant. Especially, the Kriging is more efficient th an the Bilinear in the reconstruction of peak values and it does not extrap olate local trends. The methods are applied to a set of environmental data measured in an urban area.