Inversion of Gravity Gradient Tensor Data: does it provide better resolution?

The gravity gradient tensor (GGT) has been increasingly used in practical applications, but the advantages and the disadvantages of the analysis of GGT components versus the analysis of the vertical component of the gravity field are still debated. We analyse the performance of joint inversion of GGT components versus separate inversion of the gravity field alone, or of one tensor component. We perform our analysis by inspection of the Picard Plot, a Singular Value Decomposition tool, and analyse both synthetic data and gradiometer measurements carried out at the Vredefort structure, South Africa.We show that the main factors controlling the reliability of the inversion are algebraic ambiguity (the difference between the number of unknowns and the number of available data points) and signal-to-noise ratio. Provided that algebraic ambiguity is kept low and the noise level is small enough so that a sufficient number of SVD components can be included in the regularized solution, we find that: (i) the choice of tensor components involved in the inversion is not crucial to the overall reliability of the reconstructions; (ii) GGT inversion can yield the same resolution as inversion with a denser distribution of gravity data points, but with the advantage of using fewer measurement stations.