High resolution AIRGrav surveys: Advances in hydrocarbon exploration, mineral exploration and geodetic applications

Sander Geophysics has now operated its AIRGrav airborne gravity system for over ten years. More than 2,500,000 lkm of AIRGrav surveys have been flown, predominantly for hydrocarbon exploration. Recent advances in SGL's gravity data processing, involving advanced analysis of system dynamics and improved filtering, help to further reduce system noise and allow for the generation of high quality, low noise gravity data through a wider range of survey conditions than was previously possible. In the past year, a number of AIRGrav projects with innovative survey design parameters have been successfully completed. Mineral exploration projects have been flown using a helicopter at extremely slow acquisition speed (30 knots) combined with tight (50 m) line spacing to produce data sets with higher resolution and higher accuracy. On the other end of the spectrum, the AIRGrav system produced excellent results when installed in a NASA DC 8 flown from 500 to 11000 m altitude at 300 knots, covering approximately 9,000 km in 12 hour flights, with differential GPS baselines as long as 3,000 km. New data processing techniques have allowed the extraction of the horizontal gravity components of the airborne gravity data in addition to the traditionally used scalar gravity measurement.