A Study of CHAMP Satellite Magnetic Anomalies in East Asia

Abstract

Satellite magnetic observations reflect the magnetic properties of deep crust about the depth of Curie isotherm that is a boundary where the magnetic nature of the rocks is disappeared, showing long wavelength anomalies that are not easily detected in near-surface data from airborne and shipborne surveys. For this reason, they are important not only in the analyses on such as plate reconstruction of tectonic boundaries and deep crustal structures, but in the studies of geothermal distribution in Antarctic and Greenland crust, related to global warming issue. It is a conventional method to compute the spherical harmonic coefficients from global coverage of satellite magnetic observations but it should be noted that inclusion of erroneous data from the equator and the poles where magnetic observations are highly disturbed might mislead the global model of the coefficients. Otherwise, the reduced anomaly model can be obtained with less corruption by choosing the area of interest with proper data processing to the area. In this study, I produced a satellite crustal magnetic anomaly map over East Asia (20° ~ 55°N, 108° ~ 150°E) centered on Korean Peninsula, from CHAMP satellite magnetic measurements about mean altitude of 280 km during the last year of the mission, and compared with the one from global crustal magnetic model (MF7). Also, a comparison was made with long wavelength anomalies from EMAG2 model compiled from all near-surface data over the globe.