Geostatistics with data of different support applied to mining engineering / Геостатистика с различными вспомогательными данными, применяемыми в горном деле

Geostatistical techniques are extensively used for mineral resources assessment, including grade estimation and uncertainty analysis. Support is the term used in Geostatistics to describe the size or volume of a sample. For example, suppose a grade sample obtained from diamond drill holes (DDH). In this case, the support is a function of the core’s radius and length.

In Mining Engineering applications, data that have different support are often found. For instance, many mining operations contain datasets collected in different years, with different sampling protocols and core lengths.Another example is production data, including averaged grades over a mined out area. When the data have different support, this difference should be considered to build grade models.

The use of data of different support is well established in the petroleum industry. The petroleum industry routinely combines information from wells and seismic surveys. The wells have a vertical resolution of decimeters, whereas the seismic data have a vertical resolution of ten meters or more (Pyrcz and Deutsch 2014). The seismic data usually consist of a coarse grid where all the grid cells have the same size. Moreover, the seismic data often cover the entire area of interest. <...>