An Efficient Footprint-Guided Compact Finite Element Algorithm for 3-D Airborne Electromagnetic Modeling

Abstract

The airborne electromagnetic (AEM) method is an efficient tool for assessing conductivity structures near the earth’s surface. The huge amounts of collected data over a survey area of tens to thousands of square kilometers result in an extremely high computational cost for rigorous modeling. Fortunately, for each transmitter and receiver (Tx–Rx) station, a volume of limited scale beneath the transmitter, called the footprint, contains the majority of the induced current and contributes most of the EM response at the receiver. In this letter, we develop a footprint-guided compact finite element method (CFEM), in which the inhomogeneous conductivity structure in the entire survey area is divided into small subareas based on the footprint so that the forward modeling for each subarea can be performed efficiently. The computational domain for every single Tx–Rx station consists of a small subarea and a surrounding layer. The accuracy of the algorithm is verified by comparing its solutions with semianalytical solutions on a layered earth model, and its applicability and efficiency are demonstrated with a more complex 3-D model consisting of a large inhomogeneous structure.