Archaeomagnetic data: The propagation of an error

Abstract

When utilising archaeomagnetic data to constrain geomagnetic field models, uncertainties in inclination are often given as the angular standard deviation. This is a factor of √2 larger than the standard deviation of the marginal distribution of inclination and a number of recent studies have overestimated the sampling contribution to the error budget. More generally, the uncertainties in inclination and declination are smaller than the corresponding axes of the of the error ellipse.