Joining simplified physics models with coarse grids to speed-up intractable 3D time-domain simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method combining simplified 1D physics models with coarse grid simulations to significantly reduce computation time in 3D electromagnetic modeling, maintaining acceptable accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that joins simplified physics models with coarse grids to speed up 3D electromagnetic simulations while controlling modeling errors.

Findings

Computation time reduced by a factor of 27.

Modeling error depends on subsurface properties and discretization.

Approach offers an alternative to full 3D simulations.

Abstract

Full 3D modelling of time-domain electromagnetic data requires tremendous computational resources. Consequently, simplified physics models prevail in geophysics, using a much faster but approximate (1D) forward model. We propose to join the accuracy of a 1D simplified physics model with the flexibility of coarse grids to reduce the modelling errors, thereby avoiding the full 3D accurate simulations. We exemplify our approach on airborne time-domain electromagnetic data, comparing the modelling error with the standard 3% measurement noise. We find that the modelling error depends on the specific subsurface model (electrical conductivity values, angle representing the deviation of the 1D assumption) and the specific (temporal) discretization. In our example, the computation time is decreased by a factor of 27. Our approach can offer an alternative for surrogate models, statistical relations derived from large 3D datasets, to replace the full 3D simulations.