Delineation of gravity and magnetic field source location using correlation coefficient method

Correlation coefficient has been successfully used for delineating the correlation of gravity and magnetic anomalies in study of combined interpretation with gravity and magnetic field data. Based on the correlation analysis with gravity and magnetic data sets as well as combination with other geological priority information, the algorithm is useful and extendable in the combined interpretation of geophysical data sets. In this paper, we presented the correlation coefficient algorithm which can be used for estimating potential field source location and structural index by means that compute the correlation coefficient between real data and synthetic potential field data. Generally, the causative sources are assumed to exist in different locations and their structural indices are changed from 0 to 3, and then a loop of calculations and analyzing are generated to create sets of the correlation coefficients representing the correlation of the real data and synthetic data. The correlation coefficient gets maximum value only when the location and structural index of the assumed source are consistent with the real one. Moreover, the analytic signal is used to compute the correlation coefficient for interpreting magnetic data, which can reduce the interference of magnetization direction so that the calculation equation becomes simple. We demonstrated the correlation coefficient method on synthetic and real potential field data. The test results show that the proposed method can be successfully used for simultaneously estimating the location and structural index of the source.