Application of computerised tomography methods to the interpretation of magnetic anomaly profiles

Abstract

The interpretation of a magnetic anomaly profile is achieved by solving a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind. Numerical solutions to such a problem require the conversion from the original form to a system of linear equations. The commonly used mid-point quadratic scheme for converting the integral equation into a system of linear equations is impractical because the obtained system is highly ill-conditioned and a poor approximation to the integral equation. In contrast, a strip integral quadrature method can give a very good approximation; further it enables the application of techniques of Computerised Tomography (CT) to potential field inverse problems. The new method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of the solution without any a priori knowledge and is very likely to have applications beyond the interpretation of magnetic field data.