A Stable and High-Precision Downward Continuation Method of Magnetic Data

Downward continuation is an effective technique that can be used to transform the magnetic data measured on one surface to the data that would be measured on another arbitrary lower surface. However, it suffers from amplitude attenuation and is susceptible to noise, especially when the continuation distance is large. To solve these problems, we present a stable and high-precision downward continuation method combining the ideas of equivalent source technique, Tikhonov regularization, radial logarithmic power spectrum analysis, and constrained strategy. To implement this method, the observed data is used to construct the equivalent source in the study area, and the small amount of measured magnetic data at the lower surface (relative to the original observation surface) is employed to constrain the calculation procedure simultaneously. Then the magnetic data at the target surface can be obtained by using a forward calculation procedure instead of the risky downward continuation procedure. The proposed method is tested on both synthetic model data and real magnetic data collected in the South China sea. Various obtained results demonstrate that the method reported in this study has higher accuracy and better noise resistance than the traditional downward continuation methods.