Kriging and thin plate splines for mapping climate variables

Four forms of kriging and three forms of thin plate splines are discussed in this paper to predict monthly maximum temperature and monthly mean precipitation in Jalisco State of Mexico. Results show that techniques using elevation as additional information improve the prediction results considerably. From these techniques, trivariate regression-kriging and trivariate thin plate splines performed best. The results of monthly maximum temperature are much clearer than the results of monthly mean precipitation, because the modeling of precipitation is more troublesome due to higher variability in the data and their non-Gaussian character.