The Direct Sampling method to perform multiple‐point geostatistical simulations

Multiple‐point geostatistics is a general statistical framework to model spatial fields displaying a wide range of complex structures. In particular, it allows controlling connectivity patterns that have a critical importance for groundwater flow and transport problems. This approach involves considering data events (spatial arrangements of values) derived from a training image (TI). All data events found in the TI are usually stored in a database, which is used to retrieve conditional probabilities for the simulation. Instead, we propose to sample directly the training image for a given data event, making the database unnecessary. Our method is statistically equivalent to previous implementations, but in…