Forward electromagnetic induction modelling in a multilayered half-space: An open-source software tool

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source software tool for forward electromagnetic induction modelling in multilayered half-spaces, enhancing geophysical survey planning and data inversion with an interactive GUI and a new regularized inversion algorithm.

Contribution

It extends an existing open-source EMI data inversion package with a forward modelling module, an interactive GUI, and a regularized minimal-norm inversion algorithm.

Findings

Demonstrated through a simulated case study.

Enhanced the inversion process with regularization.

Provided a theoretical overview of EMI forward modelling.

Abstract

Electromagnetic induction (EMI) techniques are widely used in geophysical surveying. Their success is mainly due to their easy and fast data acquisition, but the effectiveness of data inversion is strongly influenced by the quality of sensed data, resulting from suiting the device configuration to the physical features of the survey site. Forward modelling is an essential tool to optimize this aspect and design a successful surveying campaign. In this paper, a new software tool for forward EMI modelling is introduced. It extends and complements an existing open-source package for EMI data inversion, and includes an interactive graphical user interface. Its use is explained by a theoretical introduction and demonstrated through a simulated case study. The nonlinear data inversion issue is briefly discussed and the inversion module of the package is extended by a new regularized minimal-norm algorithm.