Digital Climate Maps


The regression kriging has been used as a mapping technique, based on the 1000 m resolution Digital Elevation Model as main climate predictor. The method of regression kriging in the first step defines the link of climatic elements with climatic factors through multiple regression, where the most important predictor is altitude, then distance from the sea and the latitude. Simple kriging of the residuals in the second step then accounts for the local or small-scale part of spatial variability and models spatial autocorrelation. Finally, the estimation by the regression model is corrected with the interpolated residues, thus obtaining the final estimate of the climatic field on a regular grid. For mapping, open source R statistical analysis and data visualization is used with the gstat package for modeling, predicting and spatial data simulations. More about the applied mapping method and gstat can be found in: