Model stability and robustness in aeromagnetic compensation

Aeromagnetic compensation is an important topic within the field of airborne magnetometry that deals with the modelling and elimination of interference effects generated by the manoeuvring of the aircraft flying in the Earth’s magnetic field. The focus of this work is on the robustness and stability of the compensation model. The importantance of these properties is discussed, and objective measures to assess them are introduced. The measures complement basic performance metrics, and are based on compensated standard-deviation performance across different data sets, and on rankings of the model’s coefficients according to their contributions to goodness of fit. Application of the measures on a number of actual field data sets is analysed to determine their merit and contribution to ensuring the quality of the data produced by aeromagnetic surveys.