Confidence and Coverage Modeling in Marine Magnetometer Survey Part II: Using Geospatial Processing to Visualize, Assess, and Review Magnetic Surveys for Archaeological Resources

Summary

The National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Office of Renewable Energy Programs have developed and tested a geospatial tool designed to automate the processing of magnetometer data. Field tested by a NPS/BOEM team across a variety of submerged cultural materials during the summer of 2013, the tool operates via a mathematical algorithm that models a ferromagnetic object’s detectability as a function of its size, magnetic field strength, and distance from sensor. The tool produces a suite of statistical information that presents both a visualization of a dataset’s coverage and a measure of confidence in the mass of objects potentially detected or missed by a magnetometer survey. This paper discusses the mathematical and physical principles driving the modeling algorithm, as well as the suite of geospatial processing tools integrated into a custom ArcGIS script.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• What’s in the Toolbox? A Critical Look at Remote Sensing and Recording Systems Used for Underwater Archaeology

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-56,07