• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.211-216
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• 2013

In general, smoothing filters regularize functions by reducing differences between adjacent values. The smoothing filters, therefore, can regularize inverse solutions and produce more accurate subsurface structure when we apply it to full waveform inversion. If we apply a smoothing filter with a constant coefficient to subsurface image or velocity model, it will make layer interfaces and fault structures vague because it does not consider any information of geologic structures and variations of velocity. In this study, we develop a selective smoothing regularization technique, which adapts smoothing coefficients according to inversion iteration, to solve the weakness of smoothing regularization with a constant coefficient. First, we determine appropriate frequencies and analyze the corresponding wavenumber coverage. Then, we define effective maximum wavenumber as 99 percentile of wavenumber spectrum in order to choose smoothing coefficients which can effectively limit the wavenumber coverage. By adapting the chosen smoothing coefficients according to the iteration, we can implement multi-scale full waveform inversion while inverting multi-frequency components simultaneously. Through the successful inversion example on a salt model with high-contrast velocity structures, we can note that our method effectively regularizes the inverse solution. We also verify that our scheme is applicable to field data through the numerical example to the synthetic data containing random noise.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.207-212
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• 2004

This article reviews recent developments in three-dimensional (3-D) magntotelluric (MT) imaging. The inversion of MT data is fundamentally ill-posed, and therefore the resultant solution is non-unique. A regularizing scheme must be involved to reduce the non-uniqueness while retaining certain a priori information in the solution. The standard approach to nonlinear inversion in geophysis has been the Gauss-Newton method, which solves a sequence of linearized inverse problems. When running to convergence, the algorithm minimizes an objective function over the space of models and in the sense produces an optimal solution of the inverse problem. The general usefulness of iterative, linearized inversion algorithms, however is greatly limited in 3-D MT applications by the requirement of computing the Jacobian(partial derivative, sensitivity) matrix of the forward problem. The difficulty may be relaxed using conjugate gradients(CG) methods. A linear CG technique is used to solve each step of Gauss-Newton iterations incompletely, while the method of nonlinear CG is applied directly to the minimization of the objective function. These CG techniques replace computation of jacobian matrix and solution of a large linear system with computations equivalent to only three forward problems per inversion iteration. Consequently, the algorithms are efficient in computational speed and memory requirement, making 3-D inversion feasible.