On the Estimation of Parameters of Variograms of Spatial Stationary Isotropic Random Processes

In this paper we consider the estimation of the variogram using the method of weighted least squares and in the process we propose two alternative set of weights. We study the asymptotic sampling properties of these estimators and compare their efficiencies both analytically and through simulations. To illustrate the above methods, we consider daily rainfall across Switzerland measured at 467 locations on a single day. We propose an alternative variogram for this data and study the efficiency of this variogram in prediction (’kriging’) compared to other variograms used in literature.