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Downward continuation of airborne gravity data based on iterative methods

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Abstract

The downward continuation (DWC) of airborne gravity data usually adopts the Poisson integral equation, which is the first kind Fredholm integral equation. To improve the stability and accuracy of the DWC, based on the traditional regularization methods and Landweber iteration method, we introduce two other iterative algorithms, namely Cimmino and component averaging (CAV). In order to cooperate with the use of the iterative algorithms, in response to the discrepancy principle (DP) stopping rule, we further investigate the monotone error (ME) rule and normalized cumulative periodogram (NCP) in this paper. The numerically simulated experiments are conducted by using the EGM2008 to simulate airborne gravity data in the western United States, which is a mountainous area. The statistical results validate that Cimmino and CAV are comparable to Landweber, and iterative methods are better than generalized cross validation and least squares in the test examples. Furthermore, the results also show that three stopping rules succeed in stopping the iterative process, when the resolution of gravity anomalies grid is \(5^{\prime }\). When the resolution is \(2^{\prime }\), DP fails to stop the iteration, and ME is unstable, and only NCP performs well.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42074001, 41774026) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M652010, 2019T120477). Valuable comments by two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. The maps were produced using the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel and Smith 1998).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NASG Key Laboratory of Land Environment and Disaster Monitoring, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China

    Haipeng Yu, Guobin Chang, Nijia Qian, Shubi Zhang & Wenyuan Zhang

  2. School of Environment Science and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China

    Haipeng Yu, Guobin Chang, Nijia Qian, Shubi Zhang & Wenyuan Zhang

Authors
  1. Haipeng Yu
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  2. Guobin Chang
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  3. Nijia Qian
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  4. Shubi Zhang
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  5. Wenyuan Zhang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection was performed by HY, and data analysis was performed by HY and NQ. The first draft of the manuscript was written by HY and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shubi Zhang.

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Yu, H., Chang, G., Qian, N. et al. Downward continuation of airborne gravity data based on iterative methods. Acta Geod Geophys 56, 539–558 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40328-021-00343-7

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