Review on the inversion Analysis of Geophysical Data

지구물리자료의 역산해석에 관한 개관

This article reviews the development of geophysical inverse theory. In a series of articles published in 1967, 1968, and 1979, G. Backus and F. Gilbert a trade-off between model resolution and estimation errors in geophysical inverse problems, and gave a criterion to compromise the reciprocal relation. Although the criterion was not clear in the physical point of view, it had been extensively used in the interpretation of geophysical date in the 1970s. This was the starting point of the fruitful development of inverse theory in geophysics. A reasonable criterion to compromise the reciprocal relation was derived to solve linear problems by D. D. jackson in 1979, introducing the concept of a priori information about unknown model parameters. This Jackson's approach was extended to solve nonlinear problems on the basis o probabilistic approach to the inverse problems formulated by A. Tarantola and B. Vallete in 1982. At the end of 1980s ABIC (Akaike Bayesian Information Criterion) was introduced for selecting a more reasonable model in geophysics. Now the date inversion is regarded as the process of extracting new information from observed data, combining in with a priori information about model parameters, and constructing a more clear image of model.