My goal is to use R or another method to trace palaeosols/palaeosurfaces across a site by comparing optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) profile readings from several vertical sections. The vertical OSL profiles posses peaks and troughs that I believe should be "diagnostic", but my efforts at overlaying and correlating them manually have not been very successful. My hope is that some R package exists out there to detect some sort of statistical correlation between the "wiggles", or failing that, I hope to find a reliable (and free) method to match them "by hand", beyond scaling and shifting the profile plots in an image editing software.

I think my main problem with the basic scaling and shifting may be the variability in the deposition environment (the site is a low alluvial terrace) over both space and time. This means that the scaling/skewing of the profiles between locations may not be strictly linear.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions using R, excel, or other available programs with no purchase required.

Unfortunately, example data from the profiles is not available at this time.