Australian Geophysical Data Collection

Brief description

Geoscience Australia is the custodian of the most comprehensive publicly available Australian airborne magnetic, gamma-ray, seismic, electromagnetic and gravity data sets. The airborne geophysics data set contains approximately 34 million line kilometres of data, which, at current prices, would cost approximately $197 million to acquire. The gravity data set contains more than 1.57 million reliable onshore stations gathered during more than 1800 surveys. The collection also includes a large number of seismic surveys from Australia offshore basins. The data types and access methods for the Offshore and Onshore data are identical. More information about this collection can be found at http://www.geoscience.gov.au/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/nas/web/ops/prod/apps/mapserver/gadds/wms_map/gadds.map&mode=browse http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/marine/survey-techniques/seismic Alternative catalogues can be found at: http://www.ga.gov.au/search/index.html#/ GeoCat # 61108 http://researchdata.ands.org.au/search/ http://data.gov.au http://find.ga.gov.au/

Notes

The geophysical data sets have wide application to research and educational institutions, government agencies, and industry. So far the data has mainly been used by industry and some of the formats and many of the programs used to process the data are mainly commercial. The research community to date has not been able to fully access the data and has not had access to tools to process it. The VGL project has opened up open source opportunities to process the data and it is hoped that the research community will find many new uses for this data set and will develop more open source tools to process it. The seismic survey data has particular value in characterising the subsurface, since it can be calibrated to wells, samples and other geophysical data sets. Making this data available to the research community will enable the development of new techniques for predicting porosities and rock properties, automating the identification of seismic facies packages and comparing this with forward modelling.
This collection is relevant to the National Strategic Research Priorities that are addressing the societal challenges for Lifting Productivity and Economic Growth and Managing our Food and Water Assets.