Interpreting potential field data using continuous wavelet transforms of their horizontal derivatives

The continuous wavelet transform has been used with much success in the analysis of non-stationary time series. It has been used much less frequently in the interpretation of magnetic or gravity data, although several approaches have been tried. A simple method of obtaining location and depth estimates of gravity and magnetic field sources is suggested here. For gravity data the method uses wavelets based on the integer-order horizontal derivatives of the gravity anomaly from a point source (the Poisson kernel). For magnetic data the wavelet is based on the integer-order horizontal derivatives of the analytic signal of the anomaly from a contact or a thin sheet. The method is compared with Euler deconvolution, and is demonstrated with synthetic models and on gravity and magnetic data from South Africa.