A ROLE FOR VARIOGRAMS

In time series texts and journals, variograms are mentioned seldom, if at all. The autocovariance function is preferred. However there are situations where the variogram can be estimated with moderate precision but the autocovariance function cannot, because the variance of the process is not well known. If the problem to be solved does not require the process variance for its solution then it is generally more straightforward to use the variogram rather than the autocovariance function in solving this problem.