Truncated geoid and gravity inversion for one point-mass anomaly

Abstract.

The truncated geoid, defined by the truncated Stokes' integral transform, an integral convolution of gravity anomalies with the Stokes' function on a spherical cap, is often used as a mathematical tool in geoid computations via Stokes' integral to overcome computational difficulties, particularly the need to integrate over the entire boundary spheroid. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the truncated geoid does, besides having mathematical applications, have physical interpretation, and thus may be used in gravity inversion. A very simple model of one point-mass anomaly is chosen and a method for inverting its synthetic gravity field with the use of the truncated geoid is presented. The method of inverting the synthetic field generated by one point-mass anomaly has become fundamental for the authors' inversion studies for sets of point-mass anomalies, which are published in a separate paper. More general applications are currently under investigation. Since an inversion technique for physically meaningful mass distributions based on the truncated geoid has not yet been developed, this work is not related to any of the existing gravity inversion techniques. The inversion for one point mass is based on the onset of the so-called dimple event, which occurs in the sequence of surfaces (or profiles) of the first derivative of the truncated geoid with respect to the truncation parameter (radius of the integration cap), its only free parameter. Computing the truncated geoid at various values of the truncation parameter may be understood as spatial filtering of surface gravity data, a type of weighted spherical windowing method. Studying the change of the truncated geoid represented by its first derivative may be understood as a data enhancement method. The instant of the dimple onset is practically independent of the mass of the point anomaly and linearly dependent on its depth.