Engineers and earth scientists are increasingly interested in quantitative methods for the analysis, interpretation, and modeling of data that imperfectly describe natural processes or attributes measured at geographical locations. Inference from imperfect knowledge is the realm of classical statistics. In the case of many natural phenomena, auto- and cross- correlation preclude the use of classical statistics. The appropriate choice in such circumstances is geostatistics, a collection of numerical techniques for the characterization of spatial attributes similar to the treatment in time...