Electric field data in inductive source electromagnetic surveys

Measurement of the electric field data due to an inductive loop source in a controlled source electromagnetic survey is not common, because electric field data, usually involving grounded electrodes, are expensive to acquire and difficult to interpret. With the recently developed capability of versatile three‐dimensional inversion, we revisit the idea of measuring electric field in a large ground loop survey for mineral exploration. The three‐dimensional modelling and inversion approach helps us quantitatively understand the detectability and recoverability of the proposed survey configuration. Our detectability study using forward modelling shows that the relative anomaly (percentage difference) in electric field does not decay with a lower induction number, but the conventional magnetic field data (dB/dt) does. Our recoverability study examines how much and what kind of information can be extracted from electric field data for the reconstruction of a three‐dimensional model. Synthetic inversions show the following observations. (i) Electric field data are good at locating lateral discontinuity, whereas dB/dt has better depth resolution. (ii) Electric field is less sensitive to the background conductivity and, thus, is prone to misinterpretation because of a bad initial model in inversion. We recommend warm‐starting the electric field inversion with an initial model from a separate dB/dt inversion. (iii) Electric field data may be severely contaminated by near‐surface heterogeneity, but an inversion can recover the deep target concealed by the geologic noise. (iv) Even one line of single‐component electric field data can greatly improve the horizontal resolution in a dB/dt inversion. Finally, we investigate a field dataset of both electric field and dB/dt measurements at a uranium deposit. The field example confirms that the electric field and magnetic field data contain independent information that is crucial in the accurate recovery of subsurface conductivity. Our synthetic and field examples demonstrate the benefit of acquiring electric field data along with magnetic field data in an inductive source survey.