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A MatLab script to perform gravity terrain corrections using DEM-EU digital

elevation model in a teaching lab

Preprint · April 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13785.83047

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A MatLab script to perform gravity terrain corrections using

DEM-EU digital elevation model in a teaching lab

Almeida F 1 , Matias M 1 , Lourenço M 2 , Martins A 1

1
University of Aveiro : GeoBioTec, Aveiro, Portugal
2
University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro: CGeo - Geosciences Center, Vila Real,
Portugal

Summary

The use of traditional or modified Hammer techniques in the calculation of gravity terrain
corrections can be time consuming and troublesome when teaching Gravity methods to
students. The availability of digital tools, GIS and easy to use script techniques provide an
opportunity to develop alternative easier and faster methods to teach gravity terrains
corrections calculation. Of course these techniques can be generally used.
The aim of this article is to share the Matlab script developed in the Teaching-Learning
process at University of Aveiro. To demonstrate this, an investigation was carried out in
Sever do Vouga, and the results from these techniques are compared with those from the use
of Hammer methods. Comparison and correlation between the terrain corrections calculated
using a Matlab script and through the Hammer method are presented and discussed.
An acceptable linear regression was found between the two methods in the rough topographic
Sever do Vouga area, 0.90 correlation coefficient and a negative median value of -0.08 mgal,
showing that the Matlab script gave results slightly lower than those from the modified
Hammer method. Thus, the GIS/Matlab methodology can be successfully explored in the
Teaching-Learning environment as well as in wider applications.

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Introduction

Geophysical exploration lectures deals with the problem of calculating gravimetric corrections to
compute the complete Bouguer anomaly (Parasnis, 2012): Earth tide, instrumental drift, latitude , free
air, Bouguer and terrain. In a Teaching-Learning process it is needed to explore the essence of the
problem by interact with primordial theoretical expressions involved that are not compatible with
instructions or procedures of standard commercial geophysical software. Nowadays, to implement the
practical determination of gravitmetric corrections, it is necessary to address knowledge related with
ttheoretical geophysical basis, Geographical Information Systems and scripts development. Some
corrections are easily implemented in a worksheet but terrain correction is not so simply because the
topographic surface with must be known with some detail to evaluate masses above or below the
station plain. Therefore graphical old fashion Hammer procedures take a lot of time to
implement.

Bashfield, A., & Keim, A. (2011) present a new digital elevation model (DEM), called EU-DEM,
which covers 32 member countries and 6 cooperating countries of the European Environment Agency
and the Environmental European Agency Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (EU-DEM ,2017)
allow to download the EU-DEM mosaics, digital surface model. These mosaics consist on raster tif
images with pixel spatial resolution of 30m and information of the local elevation.

Nowell (1999) presents an overview of gravity terrain corrections stating that these must be
standardized out to a distance considering the curvature of the earth (Bullard B) when high precision
measurements are considered. On the other hand, for exploration proposes, the Hammer procedure
limits to 22Km from the gravity station which is compatible with the accuracy of modern gravimeters.
It is also mentioned that computers dealing with digital terrain models could be used to speed up the
calculations with rectangular prisms, gausian topography fitted functions or Fourier analysis.

Hammer (1939) considered two parts for the gravitational attraction correction caused by topography.
The Bouguer correction resulting from the effect of an horizontal layer between the station and the
reference plain and the terrain correction resulting from levelling undulations about the station level.
One important parameter to perform the two corrections parts is the knowledge of the terrain density.
The Hammer method consists on the division of the area surround the station into circular zones and
sectors in which the height must be estimated representing all points of each sector. This is a process
subjected to errors derived from map accuracy and personal estimation. For the inner zones (A 2m far
from the station, B with sector radius from 2m to 16,6m, C from 16,6 to 53,3 and D from 53.3 to
170.1m) Lyman et. al (1997) proposes the use of a laser scan technic to obtain digital leveling
information. If the inner zones need to be estimated accurately the dimensions for the outer limit are
also critical to be defined.

This work aims to share the Matlab script developed in the Teaching-Learning process at Aveiro
University. Therefore, the datum of the DEM raster file was changed with QGis to the same of the
exploration stations and a crop of the tif image was generated with a buffer larger them 15km around
stations. Finally, a script in Matlab was developed to obtain terrain correction for unitary density that
can be downloadable from the researchgate site (Almeida, 2018).

Method and Theory

In the present work terrain corrections were done adding up all the contributions of excess and
missing quadrangular prism mass m (Fig. 1) that are not considered within the slab Bouguer
correction. The component of the terrain gravitational acceleration along the vertical at point P
((𝑔𝑧 )𝑃 ) is given by equation (1) where G is the gravitational constant, m is the sum of the excess
or missing masses contained in the total volume mass Mt, r is the distance between P and the centre
of each element of mass.

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 ∆𝑚
(𝑔𝑧 )𝑃 = 𝐺 ∑𝑀𝑡 sin ∝ (1)
𝑟2

Excess mass.

Missing mass P m
m 
r

Bouger Slab

Figure 1 Bouguer Slab with missing, excess masses and parameters to compute terrain correction in
equation (1).

A script was implemented in MatLab software to:

 load a digital elevation model (DEM) matrix provided by the European Environment Agency
georeferenced in QGis, in the form of a TIF format image, with the same datum of the
exploration data;
 determine the location parameters of the vertices of the TIF grid with Matlab function imfinfo;
 load a file with the coordinates easting and northing and numerical reference columns ;
 calculate the horizontal and sloped distances from point P to centers of mass (m);
 calculate the slope angle  of the vector r;
 calculate the z component of the gravitational field effect caused by each mass m;
 add all terrain effects of the individual prismatic masses as function of the distance with respect
to the point P where terrain correction is required;
 save a output file with the terrain correction and the reference columns.

The terrain correction computed with this Matlab script determines for each cell the values of the
correction, left of Fig.2, and in the end adds all values, right of Fig 2. The sum convergence is
acceptable for distances 15-20Km far from the station where corrections are been calculated.

Figure 2 Matlab script computes for each cell the values of the correction, left of Figure, and in the
end adds all points, right part of the Figure, allowing controlling the sum convergence.

Discussion

Results obtained from the Matlab script in a rough topographic Sever do Vouga region (Fig.3) were
compared with other results obtained by a modified Hammer procedure.

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Figure 3 Crop of the Digital Elevation Model EU-DEM and exploration stations.

The modified Hammer method herein considered is an automatic implementation of the standard
Hammer method. It consists in the application of a dense network of points (61558 points) centred at
each reading point, and distributed by the sectors of the network, whose elevation is interpolated from
a digital elevation model in order to determine the average elevation for each sector and,
consequently, the corresponding terrain correction.

For this purpose, an excel file is used to centre the dense network of points once the plan coordinates
of the reading point are entered. This network is then loaded in ArcGIS where, through a model
(Allen, 2010),Fig. 4, the elevations of the points are interpolated and the mean elevations of the
sectors of the Hammer Network are calculated. The results are exported to another file that allows
subsequent calculations.

Figure 4 ArcGIS model (Model Builder) used to determine the average altitude of the Hammer
Network sectors.

A satisfactory linear regression between the two approaches is depicted in Fig. 5, showing a 0.90
correlation coefficient and a negative median value of -0.08 mgal. Generally speaking the Matlab
script gave results slightly lower than those obtained with the modified Hammer method. This can be
explained because a constant value for the central pixel, side about 30m, was estimated with an
inverse square distance proportionality of the closest nine pixel elevations. Therefore, surface
undulations for the Hammer A and B zones were ignored in the Matlab script and possible, but always
positive, contributions of these surface undulations was not considered in the total sum. To obtain a
better correspondence between the two methods it is necessary to consider information obtained
manually for the A and B zones.

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 Correlation between the two Histogram of the diferences
methods between the two methods
45
2.500 40
35
CT Hammer modified

2.000 30

Frequency
25
1.500
20
1.000 y = 1.1702x 15
R² = 0.8971 10
0.500 5
0
0.000
0.000 0.500 1.000 1.500 2.000
CT Matlab Script mgal

Figure 5 Correlation between Matlab script and Hammer modified method.

Conclusions

An acceptable linear regression was found between the two methods in the rough area of Sever do
Vouga. Despite the differences between the two methods a median value of 0.08 mgal was observed,
neglecting the inner Hammer zones (A and B) surface undulations. With the GIS/Matlab methodology
several matters can be explored in the Teaching-Learning environment. Students interact with
theoretical expressions, datum and GIS georeferencing problems and Matlab processing. The Matlab
representations (right of Fig 2) allow verifying how terrain corrections converge to a constant value in
the Hammer outer limits, which is not easily seen with conventional Hammer procedures.
It is clear that this procedure can be used in wider exploration applications.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the European Environment Agency for the DEM, QGis and the
financially support of FCT project Geobiotec UID/GEO/04035/2013.

References

Allen, David W. (2010). Getting to Know ArcGIS ModelBuilder. ESRI Press. ISBN: 9781589482555
Almeida, F. (2018) Matlab code terraincorrection and_Sever_do_Vouga_data_for_terrain_correction
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324485137_terraincorrections visited 12/04/2018.
Bashfield, A., & Keim, A. (2011). Continent-wide DEM creation for the European Union. In 34th
International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment. The GEOSS Era: Towards Operational
Environmental Monitoring. Sydney, Australia(pp. 10-15).
EU-DEM (2017), Copernicus Land Monitoring Service - Data Prod-ID: DAT-193-en.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/copernicus-land-monitoring-service-eu-dem visited
11/04/2018.
Hammer, S. (1939). Terrain corrections for gravimeter stations. Geophysics, 4(3), 184-194.
Lyman, G. D., Aiken, C. L., Cogbill, A., Balde, M., & Lide, C. (1997). Terrain mapping by
reflectorless laser rangefinding systems for inner zone gravity terrain corrections. In 1997 SEG
Annual Meeting. Society of Exploration Geophysicists.
Nowell, D. A. G. (1999). Gravity terrain corrections—an overview. Journal of Applied Geophysics,
42(2), 117-134.
Parasnis, D. S. (2012). Principles of applied geophysics. Springer Science & Business Media.

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