Characteristic analysis - GIS and petroleum exploration risk

The GIS environment offers the exploration geologist a wide variety of options for integrating regionalized geodata. The full power of the methodology of Characteristic Analysis introduced in the eighties can now be exploited by means of GIS support. The characteristic analysis method uses cell based ternary coding to express both favorable and unfavorable conditions in addition to the situation where the controlling effect of an attribute is unknown or the occurrence is unevaluated within a cell. Favorability is computed by a weighted linear combination of ternary attributes using a special significance probability metric for selecting cells and variables. This paper will demonstrate the characteristic analysis metric and show how the derived favorabilities can be used to evaluate exploration risk on the Halten Terrace.