Soil moisture estimation in Southeast Gansu with Ordinary Kriging

Soil moisture is one of the most crucial information for drought monitoring, but its field observations encounters many embarrassments in practical application, one for the data inadequate caused by the sparse and uneven distribution of observation stations, the other for the poor regional effectiveness of this point-based observation data. It´s worthwhile to do research in making credible extrapolation of soil moisture from single points to region in large scale. In this paper, Ordinary Kriging in Geostatistics is introduced to solve this problem. The spatial variability of soil moisture is analyzed firstly, then taking Southeast Gansu as the study area and basing on the field observation of 2008, experiment is carried out and the result for the regional estimation of soil moisture seems good.