On the application of combined geoelectric weighted inversion in environmental exploration

Geophysical surveying methods are of great importance in environmental exploration. Inversion-based data processing methods are applied for the determination of geometrical and physical parameters of the target model. The use of this geoelectric inversion method is advantageous in environmental research where highly reliable information with large spatial resolution is required. The 2D combined geoelectric inversion (CGI) method performs more accurate parameter estimation than conventional 1D single inversion methods by efficiently decreasing the number of unknowns of the inverse problem (single means that data sets of individual vertical electric sounding stations are inverted separately). The quality improvement in parameter space is demonstrated by comparing the traditional 1D inversion procedure with a 2D series expansion-based inversion technique. The CGI method was further developed by weighting individual direct current geoelectric data sets automatically in order to improve inversion results. The new algorithm was named combined geoelectric weighted inversion, which extracts the solution by a special weighted least squares technique. It is shown that the new inversion methodology is applicable to resolve near-surface structures such as rapidly varying layer boundaries, laterally inhomogeneous formations and pinch-outs.