oa Gravity Gradiometry Resolution Study and Its Application from Synthetic Data from the Middle East

Gravity Gradiometry has long been known as a fundamentally useful geophysical quantity. Early<br>applications of Gradiometry surveying required cumbersome instruments that required time consuming<br>and delicate operation, making effective coverage of large areas difficult and expensive. Modern<br>instrumentation has enabled Gravity Gradiometry to be performed from an airborne or marine<br>platform, enabling accurate measurement of gravity gradient over explorationally significant areas in a<br>reasonable time scale.<br>The ability of a modern moving platform gradiometer to isolate its measurement from the acceleration<br>of the aircraft over a bandwidth between ~300m and 100km enables the complete field to be<br>measured, without spatial aliasing, at low observation height. This allows the survey to capture signal<br>from subsurface anomalies through the depth range of interest to both mineral and hydrocarbon<br>explorationists, while facilitating accurate definition of the overburden through integrated<br>interpretation. A demonstration of the application of this approach, in a typical Middle Eastern salt<br>structure in areas of seismic uncertainty, is made through the construction of a “realistic synthetic”<br>gravity gradient dataset, using an Earth Model and imposing realistic survey noise and uncertainty. The<br>Earth Model parameters are perturbed to demonstrate sensitivity to typical time and depth domain<br>velocity (structural) uncertainty and density uncertainty to derive the sensitivity of the integrated<br>technique to variations in the subsurface.