Denoising of gravity gradient data using an equivalent source technique

Abstract

The inherent relationship among different components of gravity gradiometer data requires applied processing to be consistent among the components. This restricts the applicability of some traditional potential-field processing techniques, but it highlights opportunities for methods uniquely suited for such data sets. The equivalent source technique is one such method. We have applied fast equivalent source construction to two aspects of gravity gradient data processing. First, we denoised multicomponent data and obtained estimates of the incoherent errors for the observations. Second, we have proposed a method that can be used to estimate errors associated with the denoised data. Through synthetic and field examples, we have evaluated the effectiveness of equivalent source processing for denoising and noise estimation.