Quality control of airborne geophysical data from the EU Mining Sector Support Programme, Ghana

On 2 December 2002, EU Commissioner Poul Nielson on behalf of the European Development Fund signed a €40 million grant to the Ghana Government. The purpose of this grant was to finance a Mining Sector Support Programme (MSSP) that covered a broad spectrum of geoscientific projects and other projects aimed at an overall strengthening and modernisation of Ghana’s mining sector. One of the major components was collection and interpretation of airborne geophysical data contracted to the two commercial geophysical companies Fugro Airborne Surveys and Geotech Airborne Ltd. The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) was contracted to perform the quality control (QC) of the airborne geophysical data collection and processing in a separate MSSP project (No 8 ACP GH 027/37). The initial Provision of quality-control services to the Airborne Geophysical Survey required GEUS to be on site in Ghana for 22 man-months; an expansion of the programme and various circumstances (see below) resulted in a total of 37.25 man-months before the project was completed in January 2010. The Danish National Space Center was subcontracted by GEUS to perform part of the QC of gravity data acquisition and processing. The QC project was reported by Thorning et al. (2010).