The utility of the enhancement techniques for mapping subsurface structures from gravity data

Abstract

An important feature in the interpretation of gravity data is the determination of the edges of the density structures. There are several different enhancement techniques used to achieve the edge locations. In this study, we aim to estimate the effectiveness of some edge enhancement techniques such as the total horizontal gradient, analytic signal, theta map, and logistic function of the total horizontal gradient in terms of their accuracy on detection of subsurface structures from gravity data. These methods were tested on synthetic gravity data with and without noise. Findings show that the logistic function of the total horizontal gradient performs better than other methods under almost all cases. Additionally, the methods are also applied to real gravity data from the Phu Khanh basin as a practical example. The results determined by the LTHG technique reveals the presence of many structures with E-W, NE-SW, NNW-SSE, ENE-WSW, and NNE-SSW trends in the basin.