New approach to interpretation of airborne magnetic and electromagnetic data

Journal ArticleWe present a new technique for underground imaging based on the idea of space-frequency filtering and downward continuation of the observed airborne magnetic and electromagnetic data. The technique includes two major methods. The first method is related to the downward analytical continuation and is based on the calculation of the total normalized gradient of the observed field. The second method is based on Wiener filtering and takes into account a priori information about typical AEM anomaly shape from a possible target

Underground imaging by frequency-domain electromagnetic migration

Journal ArticleA new method of the resistivity imaging based on frequency-domain electromagnetic migration is developed. Electromagnetic (EM) migration involves downward diffusion of observed EM fields whose time flow has been reversed. Unlike downward analytical continuation, migration is a stable procedure that accurately restores the phase of the upgoing field inside the Earth. This method is indented for the processing and interpretation of EM data collected for both TE and TM modes of plane-wave excitation. Until recently, the method could be applied only for determining the position of anomalous structures and for finding interfaces between layers of different conductivity. There were no well developed approaches to the resistivity imaging, which is the key problem in the inversion of EM data. We provide a novel approach to determining not only the position of anomalous structures but their resistivity as well. The main difficulty in the practical realization of this approach is determining the background resistivity distribution for migration. We discuss the method of the solution of this problem based on differential transformation of apparent resistivity curves. The final goal of migration is to provide a first order interpretation using a computational effort equivalent to a forward modeling calculation

A new approach to interpretation of airborne magnetic and electromagnetic data

The airborne geophysical survey carried out at the Oak Ridge Reservation has shown that AEM can be used in evaluating details of waste areas. However, detection of small objects requires a flight altitude of 10-15 m which is impossible due to natural obstacles present in the Oak Ridge area. In these types of cases, data processing in the downward continuation allows to improve the survey resolution and a normalized gradient provides an additional information about the depth of buried objects