Research on the altitude correction of aeromagnetic data

Abstract

Altitude correction of aeromagnetic data is necessary for further processing and interpretation. There are two main ways to do altitude corrections, either on discrete (flight line) data or on gridded data. According to the particularities of the data, errors are unavoidable while gridding discrete data, so the altitude correction methods based on grid data (with errors) are not accurate enough. Besides, most of the altitude correction methods based on discrete data are presently just mathematical ones and not specific to the particularities of aeromagnetic data, which could cause great errors in the results and make the methods not very satisfactory, especially for data obtained from very mountainous areas where the flying surface is generally variable. To address the above problems, we present a new approach for altitude correction as an inversion for the distribution of equivalent sources which can achieve high precision altitude corrections based on discrete aeromagnetic data. We test our approach using model data.