Acoustic pressure wave generators which produce a controlled pulse of air into the body of water.
The air guns are towed behind the dedicated vessel at a depth of a few meters and produce acoustic pressure waves that pass through the body of water to the subsurface by releasing air bubbles. The array may consist of air guns of different volumes. In such an array, the intensity of energy produced is proportional to the total volume of the air guns.
The average load divided by the peak load in a specified time period.
It is a measure of variability of consumption or generation.
A low load factor indicates that load is highly variable, whereas consumers or generators with steady consumption or supply will have a high load factor.
A technique for estimating values at those locations which have not been sampled. This process is known as ‘kriging’.
The basic technique “ordinary kriging” uses a weighted average of neighbouring samples to estimate the ‘unknown’ value at a given location. Weights are optimized using the semi-variogram model, the location of the samples and all the relevant inter-relationships between known and unknown values. The technique also provides a “standard error” which may be used to quantify confidence levels.
In mining, geostatistics is extensively used in the field of mineral resource and reserve valuation – the estimation of grades and other parameters from a relatively small set of borehole or other samples.
Geostatistics is now widely used in many other fields. Obviously there are geological and geographical applications.
However, the techniques are also used in such diverse fields as hydrology, ground water and air pollution, soil science and agriculture, forestry, epidemiology, management of wildlife and weather prediction.
