Application of 3D magnetotelluric investigation for geothermal exploration - Examples in Japan and Korea

A three-dimensional (3D) inversion technique has been developed for interpretation of magnetotelluric (MT) data. The inversion method is based on the linearized least-squares (Gauss-Newton) method with smoothness regularization. In addition to the underground 3D resistivity distribution, static shifts are also treated as unknown parameters in the inversion. The forward modeling is by the staggered-grid finite difference method. A Bayesian criterion ABle is applied to search the optimum trade-off among the minimization of the data misfit, model roughness and static shifts. The method has been applied to several MT datasets obtained at geothermal fields in Japan and other Asian countries. In this paper, two examples will be discussed: one is the data at the Ogiri geothermal area, southwestern Japan, and the other is at the Pohang low-enthalpy geothermal field, southeastern Korea. The inversion of the Ogiri data has been performed stably, resulting in a good fitting between the observed and computed apparent resistivities and phases. The recovered 3D resistivity structure is generally similar to the two-dimensional (2D) inversion models, although the deeper portion of the 3D model seems to be more realistic than that of the 2D model. The 3D model is also in a good agreement with the geological model of the geothermal reservoirs. 3D interpretation of the Pohang MT data is still preliminary. Although the fitting to the observed data is very good, the preliminary 3D model is not reliable enough because the station coverage is not sufficient for a 3D inversion.