Assessing and ameliorating edge effects in magnetic data transformations

Reduction to pole and other transformations of total field magnetic intensity data are often challenging to perform at low magnetic latitudes, when remanence exists, and when large topographic relief exists. Several studies have suggested use of inversion-based equivalent source methods for performing such transformations under those complicating factors. However, there has been little assessment of the importance of erroneous edge effects that occur when fundamental assumptions underlying the transformation procedures are broken. In this work we propose a transformation procedure that utilizes magnetization vector inversion, inversion-based regional field separation, and equivalent source inversion on unstructured meshes. We investigated whether edge effects in transformations could be reduced by performing a regional separation procedure prior to equivalent source inversion. We applied our proposed procedure to the transformation of total field magnetic intensity to magnetic amplitude data, using a complicated synthetic example based on a real geological scenario from mineral exploration. While the procedure performed acceptably on this test example, the results could be improved. We pose many questions regarding the various choices and control parameters used throughout the procedure, but we leave the investigation of those questions to future work.