A fast equivalent source method for airborne magnetic data

Airborne magnetometry is widely used, especially when facing ever-increasing need of mineral and hydrocarbon resources. Therefore, an unprecedented number of airborne magnetic data have to be processed, especially when small and light aeromagnetic surveying systems are more often deployed and high-resolution and fast-sampling aeromagnetic data are more easily accessible. So it is of great importance to develop a fast and versatile data processing method-equivalent source method capable of handling various data processing needs such as continuation, resampling, projection, and noisereduction and so on. Therefore, we have developed a fast equivalent source technique to tackle this challenge. With an integration of Gauss-fast Fourier transform and the Landweber iteration, an efficient way is proposed to compute equivalent sources for airborne magnetic data. This method can handle densely sampled airborne magnetic data on a thin and light laptop. We applied our method to real airborne magnetic data collected in the area of Karasjok, Norway. The results are promising and show great similarity to the input data.