WHAT IS RESIDUAL GRAVITY?

Abstract

The term “residual gravity” has come to have two different meanings. On the one hand it is used in the original sense, to mean what remains of Bouguer gravity after subtracting a smooth regional effect. On the other hand, since about 1949 the term has been widely used to mean the values that result from the convolution of the Bouguer values with some weighting function which is, in effect, a two‐dimensional filter. The resulting anomalies are not equivalent to residual anomalies in the older sense of the term, and it is recommended that some other name be used; “convolution gravity” is suggested.