Constrained and joint inversion on unstructured meshes

Abstract:

Unstructured meshes allow for inclusion of arbitrary surface topography, complex acquisition geometry and undulating geological interfaces in the inversion of geophysical data. This flexibility opens new opportunities for coupling different geophysical and hydrological data sets in constrained and joint inversions. For example, incorporating geological interfaces that have been derived from high-resolution geophysical data (e.g., ground penetrating radar) can add geological constraints to inversions of electrical resistivity data. These constraints can be critical for a hydrogeological interpretation of the inversion results. For time-lapse inversions of geophysical data, constraints can be derived from hydrological point measurements in boreholes, but it is difficult to include these hard constraints in the inversion of electrical resistivity monitoring data. Especially mesh density and the regularization footprint around the hydrological point measurements are important for an improved inversion compared to the unconstrained case. With the help of synthetic and field examples, we analyze how regularization and coupling operators should be chosen for time-lapse inversions constrained by point measurements and for joint inversions of geophysical data in order to take full advantage of the flexibility of unstructured meshes. For the case of constraining to point measurements, it is important to choose a regularization operator that extends beyond the neighboring cells and the uncertainty in the point measurements needs to be accounted for. For joint inversion, the choice of the regularization depends on the expected subsurface heterogeneity and the cell size of the parameter mesh.