Localization of magnetic sources underground by a data adaptive tomographic scanner

A tomography method is proposed to image magnetic anomaly sources buried below a non-flat ground surface, by developing the expression of the total power associated with a measured magnetic field. By discretising the integral relating a static magnetic field to its source terms, the total power can be written as a sum of crosscorrelation products between the magnetic field data set and the theoretical expression of the magnetic field generated by a source element of unitary strength. Then, applying Schwarz’s inequality, an occurrence probability function is derived for imaging any distribution of magnetic anomaly sources in the subsurface. The tomographic procedure consists in scanning the half-space below the survey area by the unitary source and in computing the occurrence probability function at the nodes of a regular grid within the half-space. The grid values are finally contoured in order to single out the zones with high probability of occurrence of buried magnetic anomaly sources. Synthetic and field examples are discussed to test the resolution power of the proposed tomography.