National Gravity Compilation 2019: Half Vertical Derivative Grid of Australia

2019 gravity anomaly grid derived from approximately 1.8 million ground and airborne observations collected from the 1940s to 2019. The grid has a cell size of 0.00417 degrees (approximately 435m) and shows a half vertical derivative of the complete Bouguer anomalies over Australia and its continental margins. It was processed by Geoscience Australia (GA) and incorporates data from government, industry, and research organizations, supplemented by global offshore gravity data.

Use Cases

• Map subsurface geological structures based on gravity anomaly patterns.
• Support mineral and resource exploration by identifying density contrasts in the crust.
• Integrate with other geophysical datasets (e.g., magnetic, seismic) for joint interpretation.
• Train machine learning models for automated feature detection in geospatial grids.
• Calculate terrain corrections for gravity surveys using the described bathymetry and topography data.

Strengths

• Derived from a large volume of source data: nearly 1.4 million ground stations and over 450,000 line km of airborne surveys.
• Data quality was checked by GA geophysicists to ensure it is fit-for-purpose.
• Incorporates decades of historical data (1940s to 2019) providing long-term consistency.
• Station spacing in major parts of the continent is between 2.5 and 7 km, suggesting detailed coverage.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific computational tasks.
• The description does not specify the license, which must be verified before use.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia (GA), Australian National Gravity Database (ANGD), and global sources (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA, NGA).

Collection Method

Ground and airborne gravity observations processed via standard methods and FFT to create a half vertical derivative grid.

Time Range

1940s to 2019

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 19:36:37.294191; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia and its continental margins