National Gravity Compilation 2019: Airborne DGIR 0.5VD Grid for Australia

Nearly 1.8 million gravity observations, including 1.4 million ground stations and 451,000 line km of airborne surveys, were used to generate this 2019 grid. The Australian Ocean Data Network compiled data from government, industry, and research sources dating from the 1940s to 2019. The grid shows the half vertical derivative of de-trended global isostatic residual anomalies at a cell size of approximately 435 meters over Australia and its continental margins.

Use Cases

• Modeling subsurface geological structures based on gravity anomaly data.
• Enhancing mineral exploration targeting by interpreting density variations in the crust.
• Integrating gravity data with other geophysical datasets for continental-scale studies.
• Training machine learning models to identify geological features from processed gravity grids.

Strengths

• Integrates nearly 1.8 million observations from ground, airborne gravity, and gravity gradiometry surveys.
• Combines data from multiple sources (Commonwealth, State, industry, universities) collected from the 1940s to 2019.
• Uses airborne data (451,000 line km total) to improve resolution where ground data quality was insufficient.
• Processed with standard methods and quality-checked by GA geophysicists to be fit-for-purpose.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Station and line spacing varies significantly across the continent, which may create resolution inconsistencies.
• Freshness should be verified; the underlying gravity database snapshot is from September 2019.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network, incorporating data from the Australian National Gravity Database and global sources.

Collection Method

Processed from ground observations, offshore global gravity data, and airborne surveys using standard geophysical methods and FFT processing.

Time Range

1940s to 2019

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-05 06:40:11.833691; underlying data snapshot from September 2019.

Geography

Australia and its continental margins