S. Maus and B. Roettger and K.-P. Sengpiel
We investigate the accuracy and resolution of the variogram analysis method (Maus, 1999) on synthetic and real data. Synthetic magnetic flight line data are generated for basement models of idealized geological setups. Comparing variogram depths of the data with true model depths shows that variogram depths are accurate and unbiased as long as the data analysis window is larger than 10 times the depth to be estimated. However, basement features smaller than this window size are not resolved. We investigate the trade-off between window size and lateral resolution by comparing variogram depth with drilled basement depth in the Kuiseb Dune Area, Namibia. For this difficult data set the optimum window size is more than 20 times the depth to beresolved. A provocative conclusion from our study is that one should consider flying survey lines in a regular mesh. This optimizes the retrieval of depth information per line km.