Reduction of magnetic anomaly observations from helicopter surveys at varying elevations

Abstract

Magnetic survey flights by helicopters are usually parallel to the topographic surface, with a nominal clearance, but especially in high-resolution surveys the altitudes at which observations are made may be too variable to be regarded as a smooth surface. We have developed a reduction procedure for such data using the method of equivalent sources, where surrounding sources are included to control edge effects, and data from points distributed randomly in three dimensions are directly modelled. Although the problem is generally underdetermined, the method of conjugate gradients can be used to find a minimum-norm solution. There is freedom to select the harmonic function that relates the magnetic anomaly with the source. When the upward continuation function operator is selected, the equivalent source is the magnetic anomaly itself. If we select as source a distribution of magnetic dipoles in the direction of the ambient magnetic field, we can easily derive reduction-to-pole anomalies by rotating the direction of the magnetic dipoles to vertical.