Large-scale Gauss-Newton inversion of transient controlled-source electromagnetic measurement data using the model reduction framework

Abstract

Transient data controlled-source electromagnetic measurements are usually interpreted via extracting few frequencies and solving the corresponding inverse frequency-domain problem. Coarse frequency sampling may result in loss of information and affect the quality of interpretation; however, refined sampling increases computational cost. Fitting data directly in the time domain has similar drawbacks, i.e., its large computational cost, in particular, when the Gauss-Newton (GN) algorithm is used for the misfit minimization. That cost is mainly comprised of the multiple solutions of the forward problem and linear algebraic operations using the Jacobian matrix for calculating the GN step. For large-scale 2.5D and 3D problems with multiple sources and receivers, the corresponding cost grows enormously for inversion algorithms using conventional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithms. A fast 3D forward solver based on the rational Krylov subspace (RKS) reduction algorithm using an optimal subspace selection was proposed earlier to partially mitigate this problem. We applied the same approach to reduce the size of the time-domain Jacobian matrix. The reduced-order model (ROM) is obtained by projecting a discretized large-scale Maxwell system onto an RKS with optimized poles. The RKS expansion replaces the time discretization for forward and inverse problems; however, for the same or better accuracy, its subspace dimension is much smaller than the number of time steps of the conventional FDTD. The crucial new development of this work is the space-time data compression of the ROM forward operator and decomposition of the ROM’s time-domain Jacobian matrix via chain rule, as a product of time- and space-dependent terms, thus effectively decoupling the discretizations in the time and parameter spaces. The developed technique can be equivalently applied to finely sampled frequency-domain data. We tested our approach using synthetic 2.5D examples of hydrocarbon reservoirs in the marine environment.