Two-step inversion of airborne geophysical data: a stable downward continuation approach for physical modelling.

Airborne potential field geophysical survey is employed for a variety of purposes to cover in a cost-effective manner large prospect areas. Despite the many advantages of airborne data measurements, due to the height from the ground, the received response is weakened (signal attenuation) and causes inadequacies in data representation. Accordingly, it is expected that the inversion results are far from reality and there are shortcomings in the retrieved model. This study investigates the impact of airborne survey on small-sized magmatic units, where directly inverting airborne data suffer from signal attenuation and lead to the loss of the causative model. In this study we improved the airborne data inversion by mixing a two-step cooperative approach which enhances the potential field data by a stable downward continuation to the ground surface in the spectral domain, and subsequently running a physical property modelling. The efficiency of the method over one-step airborne data inversion is examined for a synthetic multi-source case (magnetic and gravity) and then is used to find out the close spatial link between magnetometry signatures and iron–phosphate sources in the Esfordi district in Iran. The results showed that the proposed method performed better than direct inversion of airborne data and could satisfactorily identify the sources of the anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]