Recent Release
Book Chapter 6 (2025)
 

Improving Data Quality of an Old Airborne Geophysical Survey to Support Geological Mapping: A Case Study in Tahifet Region, Hoggar (Algeria).

Authors: Karim Allek, Hocine Zeghouane, Mohamed Hamoudi, Daoud Groun

 

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss the data qualityissues of an airborne geophysical survey (magnetic andradiometric) carried out in the 1970s in Algeria, andpropose a convincing (compelling) solution to a complexnoise problem that mainly affects the radiometric data.The quality of the collected radiometric data is moderatedue to technological limitations, the use of uncalibratedgamma-ray spectrometer, and no background noiseestimation procedure was implemented during the survey.The measurements present a serious signal-to-noiseproblem that alters the radiometric signatures of the soiland prevents better recovery of some geological signal.We motivate our study using a case example integratinggamma-ray spectrometric and magnetic data of theTahifet region in the Central Hoggar area (southernAlgeria). The datasets were corrected, gridded and filteredto visualize the radiometric and magnetic features and todefine geological boundaries based on gamma-ray spectrometricresponses. The obtained geophysical imageswere combined with published 1:200,000 geologicalmaps to improve the geological knowledge of the regionand to provide valuable information for the study of somepoorly mapped structural and geological features.