An integrated application for geostatistical analysis of sea outfall discharges based on R software

This paper describes an integrated application that performs a geostatistical analysis of data acquired by an AUV in monitoring missions to sewage outfalls. This comes as an effort for automating the procedures of a monitoring campaign from data acquisition to data processing. This application is based on the R statistical software and uses the Gstat package for the geostatistical prediction. R is a console based application that uses software packages developed by the community. The application interfaces with R guiding the user through several steps that perform the geostatistical analysis. It was not our intention to cover all geostatistical procedures but only the ones that are needed for the data processing concerned. The major advantage of this application is that the user does not need to be familiar with methods and data structures associated with the base software, allowing the processing and analysis to be more simple, fast and efficient which is particularly important for routine monitoring. This software application also enables us to give a quicker response in case of contamination to near-by beaches.