[R-sig-Geo] another kriging question

[Dave Depew]

Hi again,
I'm getting more confused regarding the "accepted" forms of detrending 
data prior to kriging. I've used a GAM (package mgcv) to detrend my 
target variable. The residuals from this 9th order polynomial are well 
behaved (normal distribution, only mild heteroskedasticity). I realize 
that unlike the nlme package, the GAM from mgcv does not account for the 
locations of the data, so the predicted data may not be statistically 
optimal, but it was unclear whether the nlme package could also fit such 
a trend to the data ( i suspected that it could, I'm obviously not 
entering the code correctly). Oddly enough, adding the trend back to the 
kriged residuals produced a similar map that using universal kriging 
did...I suspect that this is because the majority of the prediction area 
involves a portion of the data trend which could probably be modelled 
reasonably well as a linear trend....

I guess, I'm not sure if there is a "standard" as to measure 
against...As I also struggle with the concept of stationarity at times, 
I find it is easy to get quickly confused. Almost all of the variograms 
I produce from these data sets (either the raw data, or the residuals in 
the presence of a weak trend) are bounded (i.e reach a sill), although a 
few behave oddly at very large distances (well past the range of the 
variogram)...I've interpreted this as simply a major reduction in the 
numbers of point pairs that are available to compute  the semivariance, 
but my overall impression is that the data could be considered as second 
order or intrinsically stationary...

If anyone has any thoughts or advice, I'd appreciate hearing your opinions.

Thanks,

Dave