Structural joint inversion on irregular meshes

Abstract

SUMMARY Structural joint inversion of several data sets on an irregular mesh requires appropriate coupling operators. To date, joint inversion algorithms are primarily designed for the use on regular rectilinear grids and impose structural similarity in the direct neighbourhood of a cell only. We introduce a novel scheme for calculating cross-gradient operators based on a correlation model that allows to define the operator size by imposing physical length scales. We demonstrate that the proposed cross-gradient operators are largely decoupled from the discretization of the modelling domain, which is particularly important for irregular meshes where cell sizes vary. Our structural joint inversion algorithm is applied to a synthetic electrical resistivity tomography and ground penetrating radar 3-D cross-well experiment aiming at imaging two anomalous bodies and extracting the parameter distribution of the geostatistical background models. For both tasks, joint inversion produced superior results compared with individual inversions of the two data sets. Finally, we applied structural joint inversion to two field data sets recorded over a karstified limestone area. By including geological a priori information via the correlation-based operators into the joint inversion, we find P-wave velocity and electrical resistivity tomograms that are in accordance with the expected subsurface geology.