Computer Methods in the Geosciences

This is the sixth contribution to the Computer Methods in the Geosciences series­ and it continues the tradition of being practical, germaine, and easy to read. Michael Hohn in his presentation, Geostatistics and Petroleum Geology, nicely compliments the other books in the series and brings to the readers some new techniques by which to analyze their data. New approaches always result in new ideas or enhancement of old ones. The French School of Geostatistiques (Fontainebleau, France) was founded and developed by Georges Matheron in response to problems in mining explo­ ration and exploitation. This approach has been used successfully in that industry since the mid-1960s, but only recently applied to similar problems in petroleum. Likewise, these applications have been successful in this applied field as well and here Hohn gives examples. Standard subjects of the field of geostatistics are explored and discussed-the semivariogram, kriging, cokriging, nonlinear and parametric estimation, and conditional simulation. These may be unrecognizable terms to the readers now, but upon completion of reading the book, they will be fimiliar ones. Each subject is discussed in detail with appropriate and pertinent case studies, taken from the author's own research or from the literature. The author notes the book is for working geologists in the petroleum industry.