Accuracy Assessment of Geostatistical Methods for Zoning of heavy metals in soils of urban-industrial areas

Abstract:According to the IPI (integrated pollution index) report, almost 65 percent of all cities and dust of their roads were polluted with heavy metals. These areas threaten the health of human. Identifying, mapping and monitoring the pollution are the first step in contamination management. Hence, in recent decades many methods are presented to identify and mapping based on computer software that among these methods can be named Geostatistical methods. Geostatistical methods for considering the spatial correlation of data have a great importance in geochemical study. This study evaluates the efficiency of three methods Kriging, Cokriging and IDW, in addition compares them together. The best method was used for zoning and mapping metals lead, cadmium, zinc, copper, nickel, iron and manganese in Cheetgar park in west of Tehran. Results showed that Kriging was the best interpolation method which showed the higher accuracy in estimating of data compared to other methods. IDW was also as a suitable method to estimate the heavy metals while Cokriging due to low correlation with covariates was detected as an inappropriate method.