Assessment of prospective areas for providing the geochemical anomaly maps of lead and zinc in Parkam district, Kerman, Iran

Abstract

There are several statistical methodologies presented for separating anomalous values from background leading to determination of anomalous areas. These methods range from simple approaches to complicated ones and include nonstructural and structural methods, subtraction separation method and so on. Structural methods take the sampling locations and their spatial relation into account for estimating the anomalous areas. The U-statistic method is one of the most important structural methods. It considers the location of samples and carries out the statistical analysis of the data without judging from a geochemical point of view and tries to separate subpopulations and also to determine anomalous areas. In the present study, several nonstructural methods including assessment of threshold based on median and standard deviation, median absolute deviation (MAD) and P.N product are used and U-statistic is considered as structural method to assess prospective areas of Parkam district. Results show that MAD method reduced background well and P.N method increased correlation of points. However, U-statistic method plays the role of both mentioned advantages meaning in addition to reducing outlier data effect, it regularizes anomalous values and also their dispersion is reduced significantly. It is possible to determine anomaly areas according to anomalous samples positioning so that denser areas are more important. Finally, lithogeochemical map of study area is provided for lead and zinc.