Geostatistical integration of gravity and magnetotelluric data to enhance resolution of geologic structure

Abstract

Abstract To enhance the spatial resolution, two types of complementary integration methods were developed using gravity and magnetotelluric (MT) data. The first method involves the enhancement processing of gravity vertical resolution using MT data. This is called a layer density correction (LDC) process which makes the density distribution more sensitive to geologic structure. The second method involves the spatial expansion processing of MT data using the enhanced gravity data. In this process, non-linear indicator transformation (NLIT) and simple kriging with varying local means (SKlm) methods were employed. The assumptions are that while the results are analyzed by different physical properties, each method senses the same underlying geologic structure and thus there is a relationship among the physical properties. The proposed geostatistical integration methods were tested using synthetic models and field data. The experiment illustrates that the integration method proposed in this study can provide improved structures. The method integrates constructively the gravity information having a wider spatial distribution and the MT information having higher vertical resolution.