Advances in Helicopter Airborne Electromagnetics

Summary

Launched onto the Australian market in early 2011, HELITEM is a powerful helicopter time domain electromagnetic system. It was developed by Fugro Airborne Surveys for exploration applications with an emphasis on the detection of deep conductors. Recent innovations have seen an increase in the peak dipole moment and a new receiver platform that have further improved the signal to noise ratio of HELITEM data.

To test the performance of the HELITEM system in the Australian environment, a survey was completed over the Forrestania EM test range. A range of modelling techniques were applied to the survey data to extract features in the ground response. Correlations between the modelled results and known target parameters confirmed the ability of the HELITEM system to detect targets in typical Australian conductive overburden conditions.

Key words::

• airborne electromagnetics (AEM)
• time domain electromagnetics (TDEM)
• HELITEM
• Layered Earth Inversion (LEI)