Abstract
Summary Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and time domain electromagnetic (TEM) are two widely adopted geophysical methods for near surface resistivity mapping. However, the results produced by the two may differ due to fundamental differences in physical principles, sensitivity, system geometry. The main objective of this paper is to provide a one-to-one comparison of ERT against a newly developed towed TEM system tTEM and comparison of tTEM against its airborne counterpart SkyTEM. We compare three methods using both synthetic as well as field data. Overall, we found that inversion results are comparable across the three methods. They all capture the prominent features of synthetic models. The ERT and tTEM inversion of field data show very comparable results even in the top 5 m where both can image thin resistive layers. However, the resistivity of the thin resistive layer is better resolved using ERT because of its high sensitivity close to the surface. In deeper part of the profile, tTEM tends to produce better resolved boundaries compared to the ERT method. Comparing the SkyTEM inversion results against the tTEM, shows that tTEM has a better vertical and horizontal resolution in the top 20 m.
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