Electromagnetic modelling with topography on regular grids with equivalent materials

Abstract

SUMMARY Maxwell’s equations are valid regardless of the choice of the coordinate system. By this property a change of coordinates can be equivalently expressed as a change of the material parameters. This idea opens a new approach to the problem of accurate electromagnetic modelling in the vicinity of steep topography or bathymetry. Via a change of coordinates, any earth model with complicated layer interfaces can be represented by an equivalent model where those interfaces are flat, but with its materials correspondingly altered. This new model could then be discretized on a regular mesh and fields could be computed by an appropriate finite difference or integral equation code. Unfortunately, this is not straightforward because both the new electric and magnetic materials are fully anisotropic. By instead applying a finite element secondary field approach to the equivalent model, we can completely account for the topography interface in the planar layered background model. The only modification required to existing finite element formulations is a slightly more complicated right-hand side of the linear system of equations, whereas the system matrix is unchanged in any coordinate system. In a numerical modelling experiment we confirm that our technique gives increased accuracy when compared with a recently published technique for dealing with topography in a secondary field formulation for the case of a magnetotelluric source field. In turn, in the vicinity of conductivity anomalies, accuracy can also be negatively affected.