A comparative study of THG, AS, TA, Theta, TDX and LTHG techniques for improving source boundaries detection of magnetic data using synthetic models: A case study from G. Um Monqul, North Eastern Desert, Egypt

Abstract

The boundaries detection techniques have a great role in enhancing and interpreting the geologic features of magnetic data. In the literature, several filters (THG, AS, TA, NTilt, Theta, TDX, TAHG, LTHG) for identifying the boundaries of the magnetic sources have been suggested. These methods are generally performed based on gradients (vertical and horizontal) of the potential field. This paper presents a comparative investigation of different boundary detection filters including THG (total horizontal gradient), AS (analytical signal), TA (tilt angle), Theta (Cos θ), TDX (horizontal tilt angle), and LTHG (Logistic function of the THG). The effect of each filter was examined on two synthetic magnetic data sets. Moreover, the filters are also applied to a real magnetic data set from the Gabal (G) Um Monqul, North Eastern Desert (NED) of Egypt. The obtained results were correlated with known geologic structures of the study area. From the comparison between several applied methods, the horizontal boundaries of geologic sources obtained by the LTHG were found to be sharper and clearer than other ones. The results confirm that the LTHG method is an effective filter for interpreting aeromagnetic data qualitatively and can be applied for enhancing the source edges of different potential field datasets.