Resistivity and Calibration Error Estimations for Small-Loop Electromagnetic Method

The frequency-domain small-loop electromagnetic (EM) instruments are increasingly used for shallow environmental and geotechnical surveys because of their portability and speed. However, it is well known that the data quality is generally so poor that quantitative interpretation of the data is not justified in many cases. We present an inversion method that allows the correction for the calibration errors and also constructs multidimensional resistivity models. The key point in this method is that the data are collected at least at two different heights. The forward modeling used in the inversion is based on an efficient 3-D finite-difference method, and its solution was checked against 2-D finite-element solution. The synthetic and real data examples demonstrate that the joint inversion recovers reliable resistivity models from multi-frequency data severely contaminated by the calibration errors.