Application of the new international geomagnetic reference field (IGRF80) to large sets of marine magnetometer data

Abstract

Measurements of the magnetic field made over an interval of time must be corrected for secular variation before the data can be merged. The older versions of International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) failed to model secular variation adequately, and compilation of magnetic anomaly maps from different data sets often required numerous ad-hoc adjustments. With the superiority of the new IGRF at modelling secular variation, the merging of multi-year data sets has become much more practicable. This has been demonstrated in the consolidation of nearly 400 000 data points collected between 1972 and 1980 during 10 different survey cruises in the southwest Labrador Sea. Improvements in the IGRF have been achieved at a substantial cost in computing overhead. The new reference field expressions are more complicated than the old, and hence are slower to evaluate on digital computers. When processing large data sets, this can cause unacceptable delays. A third degree polynomial technique has been devised that approximates the total field portion of the full IGRF expression for a limited time and region. The method reduces processing time by a factor of 40, with little sacrifice in accuracy.