Practical method for drawing a VGP path

• DOI: 10.1016/0031-9201(92)90183-v
• Publication Date: 2002-11-12T15:46:34Z
• Authors: Maxime Le Goff; Bernard Henry; Lucien Daly
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

A statistical method is proposed for the smoothing of polar wander paths and for giving their confidence limits by the mean of successive ellipses. The method is fully parametrical and is based on the relations between the inertia matrix and the parameters of the Fisher distribution, from which a bivariate form is deduced. An elementary tensorial calculation gives the parameters of the confidence ellipse around a vectorial weighted mean, for any unimodal set of vectors. This model can also be used for other statistical tests, wherever the rotational symmetry hypothesis is not consistent (i.e. the fold test).