Digitization of Bromide Paper Records to Extract One-Minute Geomagnetic Data

Abstract

Many long-term geomagnetic observation results recorded on photographic bromide paper have not yet been fully digitized. To that end, we developed a method to automatically convert photographic records to one-minute digital data. We applied our method to the observation records of Kakioka Magnetic Observatory and confirmed that the resolution of time and amplitude could be greatly improved by numerical conversion compared with conventional data conversion by hand scaling. Our results suggest that highly precise digitization of analog magnetograms is possible.