Rapid Surrogate Modeling of Electromagnetic Data in Frequency Domain Using Neural Operator

Abstract

The efficiency of solving geophysical inverse problem largely relies on the efficiency of solving the corresponding forward problem. As for electromagnetic (EM) data forward modeling in frequency domain, the conventional numerical methods, e.g. finite difference method (FDM), discretize the governing equations resulting a large linear system which is usually expensive to solve. Meanwhile, for inversion iteration we normally do not need to solve the forward problem in high precision. Thus a rapid surrogate modeling approach which uses the neural network is promising for replacing the forward modeling module in the inversion scheme. Here we proposed an algorithm which uses the neural operator to solve the EM data modeling problem in the frequency domain. To develop a surrogate model for EM data forward problem, we introduce an extended Fourier neural operator (EFNO) that enables the calculation at least 100 times faster than the conventional FDM solver while maintaining good precision. Moreover, by adding a sub-network the proposed neural operator has good generalization which has the capacity of predicting solution at any site locations and frequencies. Due to the discretization-invariance of Fourier neural operator, the neural operator trained on coarse grids can easily transfer to fine grids with only retraining part of parameters, resulting in a super-resolution prediction capability. We test our proposed method with 2-D and 3-D magnetotelluric (MT) data modeling problems, demonstrating that the EFNO has great potentials for severing as a general rapid surrogate forward solver in EM data inversion scheme.