Aeromagnetic Compensation With Suppressing Heading Error of the Scalar Atomic Magnetometer

Scalar atomic magnetometer (SAM) with high sensitivity is designed to measure the total magnetic field and has been widely applied in aeromagnetic surveys. However, the measured total magnetic field of SAM is influenced by the magnetic disturbances due to the permanent, induced and eddy-current fields of the aircraft and heading errors of SAM. To reduce the magnetic disturbances caused by the aircraft maneuvers, a model was proposed by Tolles and Lawson and has been used in aeromagnetic compensation. However, the heading error of SAM deviates the compensation coefficients estimated by the Tolles-Lawson model. In this letter, we propose a linear model of heading error for multi-cell SAMs and analyze the new aeromagnetic compensation model in which the geomagnetic gradient and heading error are both taken into account. With using a ⁴He magnetometer consisting of three orthogonal cells, the experimental results show that our proposed model has better performances than the previous model in terms of the figure of merit (FOM) and standard deviation (STD).