Statistical evaluation of spatial interpolation methods for small-sampled region: A case study of temperature change phenomenon in Bangladesh

Abstract

This study compares three interpolation methods to create continuous surfaces that describe temperature trends in Bangladesh between years 1948 and 2007. The reviewed techniques include Spline, Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and Kriging. A statistical assessment based on univariate statistics of the resulting continuous surfaces indicates that there is little difference in the predictive power of these techniques making hard the decision of selecting the best interpolation method. A Willmott statistical evaluation has been applied to minimize this uncertainty. Results show that IDW performs better for average and minimum temperature trends and Ordinary Kriging for maximum temperature trends. Results further indicate that temperature has an increasing trend all over Bangladesh noticably in the northern and coastal southern parts of the country. The temperature follows an overall increasing trend of 1.06o C per 100 years. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.