A novel method for computing the vertical gradients of the potential field: Application to downward continuation

Summary Downward continuation is a very useful technique in the interpretation of potential field data. It would enhance the short wavelength of the gravity anomalies or accentuate the details of the source distribution. Taylor series expansion method has been proposed to be one of the best downward continued methods. However, the method using high-order vertical derivatives leads to low accuracy and instability results in many cases. In this paper, we propose a new method using a combination of Taylor series expansion and upward continuation for computing vertical derivatives. This method has been tested on the gravitational anomaly of infinite horizontal cylinder in both cases with and without random noise for higher accurate and stable than Hilbert transform method and Laplace equation method, especially in the case of noise input data. This vertical derivative method is applied successfully to calculate the downward continuation according to Taylor series expansion method. The downward continuation is also tested on both complex synthetic models and real data in the East Vietnam Sea (South China Sea). The results reveal that by calculating this new vertical derivative, the downward continuation method gave higher accurate and stable than the previous downward continuation methods.