Aplicación del análisis geoestadístico al diseño de programas de muestreos en formaciones salinas

Abstract

Water content in salt formations is a regionalised variable rather than a random variable. This means that the yield of the variable in one location varies very slightly from that of close locations. This paper focus on the minimisation of uncertainties of the water content caused by spatial variability and limited number of samples, in order to assess optimised sampling intervals for representative sampling procedures in salt formations. Geostatistical analyses have been performed using small-scale and large-scale sampling intervals in several salt formations. Results show that geostatistical analyses can be successfully used, provided that the dimensions of the studied rockbody do not exceed the range of the regionalised variable by more than one order of magnitude. Otherwise, a simple statistical approximation should provide the degree of accuracy needed when estimating sample means.