Optimizing the design of geophysical experiments: Is it worthwhile?

Abstract

Determining the structure, composition, and state of the earth's subsurface from measured data is the principal task of many geophysical experiments or surveys. Standard procedures involve the recording of appropriate data sets followed by the application of data analysis techniques to extract the desired information. Whereas the importance of new tools for the analysis stage of an experiment is well recognized, much less attention seems to be paid to improving the data acquisition. A measure of the effort allocated to data analysis research relative to that devoted to data acquisition research is presented in Figure 1. Since 1955 there have been more than 10 000 publications on inversion methods alone, but in the same period only 100 papers on experimental design have appeared in journals. Considering that the acquisition component of an experiment defines what information will be contained in the data, and that no amount of data analysis can compensate for the lack of such information, we suggest that g...