Estimating structural dip from gravity and magnetic profile data

Abstract

The anomalies of ideal sources, dipping magnetic contacts and dipping density sheets, provide the theoretical basis for estimating structural dip from gravity and magnetic profile data. The dip is always related to the local phase angle of a complex analytic signal evaluated directly over the source. For magnetic sheets, the complex analytic signal is constructed from the anomaly and its Hilbert transform. For magnetic contacts or density sheets, it is constructed from the first‐order horizontal and vertical derivatives of the anomaly. Dip estimation is implemented as an integral part of source‐location algorithms. The analytic signal and local wavenumber methods require interpolation of the local phase from sampled anomaly or derivative values. In the case of extended Euler deconvolution and multiple‐source Werner deconvolution the dip is derived as part of the least squares solution.