Application of Occam’s inversion to airborne time-domain electromagnetics

Abstract

Airborne time-domain electromagnetics (ATDEM) methods are regularly used for mining, hydrocarbon, and groundwater exploration. A large quantity of data is collected along survey lines from an aircraft, and there is an incentive to interpret these data in a systematic way. When the geology is appropriate, the use of 1D inversion methods is justified. Among these methods are: conductivity-depth transform (CDT) (Wolfgram and Karlik, 1995), layered-earth inversion (Sattel, 1998), Zohdy's method (Sattel, 2005), and Occam's inversion (Constable et al., 1987; Sattel, 2005). These methods either require considerable tuning to get realistic results, are limited to step response data, or require considerable experimentation with the initial guess to ensure a reasonable result. The advantage of the Occam's algorithm is that it can be easily adapted to different ATDEM methods and is not strongly dependent on the initial guess. Furthermore, there are not a lot of parameters to tune in order to get a reasonable result. The weakness of the Occam's inversion is that for ATDEM data, the process requires a great deal of computer time. In this paper, we review details of the application of Occam's method to ATDEM data and we present the results of some of our experiments.