Stable Downward Continuation of Airborne Potential Field Geophysical Data: an Investigation of Stabilizer Family

Attenuation of the signal received from the sources causing anomalies is the negative feature of the airborne measurements. Using a stable downward continuation method is a practical way to address this shortcoming. In this work, we investigate the efficiency of various stabilizers in achieving a stable downward continued data. The purpose of this work is to select the most appropriate stabilizer(s) for this operation. We examine the various stabilizing functions by introducing them into the Tikhonov regularization problem. The results of the research work on the synthetic airborne gravity and magnetic data show that the βL1 (the other definition of L1 norm) and SM (the smoothest model) stabilizers have the potential to be used in the stable implementation of the downward continuation method. These stabilizers perform better than the others in the three comparisons including the visual, quantitative (RMS error), and graphical comparisons. Also by examining the airborne magnetic data related to the Esfordi district in the Yazd Province (Iran), it has been found that, in general, the βL1 stabilizer is more suitable than the other stabilizing functions studied in this research work.