[GRASS-user] Interpolating rainfall data across area from points

[Rich Shepard]

   I want to determine whether GRASS or R is best suited to
interpolating/extrapolating annual mean precipitation data from 58 reporting
stations (unevenly distributed within the county) across the county. Some
flavor of kriging would be applied to these data to illustrate a general
long-term pattern of rainfall.

   Some years ago there was both a static display of a chemical constituent
in a river reach, a "heat map", (and an automation of temporal changes, if I
correctly recall) and I'm not finding this in the web site galleries.

   While elevation could be included as an explanatory variable using
regression kriging my purpose is to illustrate county-wide mean annual rainfall
distribution over a 13 year period, not to interpolate values for specific,
unsampled locations.

   Please provide some thoughts on the work flow to do this within GRASS. I'm
digging into the gstat docs to get a sense of how to do this within R (and I
have the rgrass7 package working well; it imported the GRASS county boundary
map which I converted to a SpatialPolygonDataFrame.)

Rich