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Amplitude-balanced curvatures of geophysical data

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Abstract

Many different fields, such as terrain analysis, medical imaging, and of course the Geosciences, have used the curvature of their data for many years to enhance subtle details. Despite the fact that the calculations of the curvature are based on second-order derivatives of the data and are therefore sensitive to noise, curvature has proved itself to be a useful aid to the interpretation of the data. Although there are many different curvatures that can be computed from a 2D (map) dataset, they all have a response that depends on the amplitude of the data, so that small-amplitude features can be missed. This manuscript shows how amplitude-balanced curvatures can be computed, and the technique is demonstrated on synthetic data and also on gravity and magnetic datasets from South Africa.

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Data availability

The gravity and magnetic data used belongs to the Council for Geoscience, Pretoria.

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Acknowledgements

The Council for Geoscience, Pretoria, are thanked for permission to use the data that is shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The reviewers and editors are thanked for their constructive comments which have improved the manuscript.

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The code for this project is not available.

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Correspondence to Gordon Robert John Cooper.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Responsible Editor: Narasimman Sundararajan

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Cooper, G.R.J. Amplitude-balanced curvatures of geophysical data. Arab J Geosci 14, 280 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-021-06595-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-021-06595-5

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