Large-scale seismically guided anisotropic inversion of towed-streamer EM data in the Barents Sea

Abstract

This paper presents a fast and efficient large-scale anisotropic inversion technique for towed streamer electromagnetic (EM) data, which incorporates seismic constraints. The inversion algorithm is based on the 3D contraction integral equation method and utilizes a reweighted regularized conjugate gradient technique to minimize the objective functional (Zhdanov et al. 2014a, b). We have also introduced the concept of a moving sensitivity domain for seismically guided EM inversion, originally developed for airborne EM surveys (Zhdanov and Cox, 2013), which makes it possible to invert the entire large-scale towed streamer EM survey data while keeping the accuracy of the computation of the EM fields. The developed algorithm and software can take into account the constraints based on seismic and well-log data, and provide the inversion guided by these constraints. To demonstrate the practical effectiveness of this approach for large-scale inversion of marine EM data, as well as integration with seismic data, we apply the method to the inversion of about 2000 line-km of towed streamer EM data. The data form part of a larger survey in the Norwegian Barents Sea (McKay et al., 2016). We show that the technique produces a single resistivity model that is consistent with both the measured EM data and the main seismically defined structures. Thus, the resistivity model is ready to be interpreted and used in further quantitative interpretation studies.