| Abstract: | The Radon transform is applied to airborne geophysical data, which consist of parallel profiles, analogous to a seismic record. The plane-wave decomposition (PWD) thus becomes the strike-direction decomposition (SDD) since the observed spatially distributed information is represented by its strike directions in a domain achieved by the transformation. It is important that, after the SDD, we can identify anomalies and work on them according to their strikes. In particular, for gridding purposes, we may guide the second interpolation of the bi-directional gridding approach along the strike directions. In principle, the proposed Radon transform gridding method (RTGM) transforms the observed parallel profiles into a domain where information is mapped as its strike-direction ‘traces’ against its wavelengths. The number of strike directions into which the data are decomposed is equal to the number of lines to be interpolated. The Fourier spectrum of the grid is reconstructed from the strike-wavenumber domain by using the projection-slice theorem and the final square grid is obtained by performing an inverse Fourier transformation on the spectrum. The SDD is restricted to the Nyquist wavenumber bandwidth imposed by the survey line-spacing, so that there is no addition of ambiguous short wavelengths in the gridded data. A tapering window is employed to prevent any Gibb's oscillation in the final grid because of the sharp Nyquist cut-off in the reconstructed spectrum due to the survey line-spacing. The RTGM is first tested on a set of synthetic line-based data. It is also applied to aeromagnetic profile data from northern Botswana as a practical example. |
