Estimating the magnetization direction of sources from southeast Bulgaria through correlation between reduced‐to‐the‐pole and total magnitude anomalies

TLDR: In this article, the direction of the magnetization vector of geological bodies is estimated based on the correlation between the reduced-to-the-pole field for tentative values of magnetization direction and the total magnitude anomaly, obtained by a transform of the measured magnetic field.

Abstract: We present a new method to estimate the direction of the magnetization vector of geological bodies based upon the correlation between the reduced-to-the-pole field for tentative values of the magnetization direction and the total magnitude anomaly, obtained by a transform of the measured magnetic field. The reduced-to-the-pole and the total magnitude anomaly are centred over the sources in the case of 2D anomalies or well-centred in the case of compact 3D sources and have similar patterns for the same source. The method has several important advantages over similar transform-correlation methods for estimation of the magnetization direction. It calculates only one transform for many tentative values of the magnetization direction. The method does not use derivatives of any order and relies on confident isolation of the target anomalies based on one of the compared transforms, the total magnitude anomaly. We studied the performance of the method on five 2.5D and compact 3D sources. We analysed possible inherent to the method errors, as well as errors due to interference from neighbouring sources. Finally, we estimated the magnetization-vector direction of the main sources causing the magnetic field in the Burgas region and the adjoining southeast Bulgarian Black Sea shelf. The sources in the Black Sea shelf show prevalently reverse magnetization, while the sources on land have normal or reverse magnetization.