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Interpretation attributes derived from airborne electromagnetic inversion models using the continuous wavelet transform
Author(s) -
Christensen Niels B.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
near surface geophysics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.639
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1873-0604
pISSN - 1569-4445
DOI - 10.1002/nsg.12018
Subject(s) - inversion (geology) , geology , hydrogeology , borehole , wavelet , regional geology , geophysics , interpreter , interpretation (philosophy) , environmental geology , data processing , remote sensing , data mining , computer science , algorithm , artificial intelligence , seismology , geotechnical engineering , tectonics , metamorphic petrology , telmatology , programming language , operating system
Planning, contracting, data acquisition and processing plus the inverter's quality assessment and inversion of a regional airborne electromagnetic survey may take some months, while the interpretation of the results is a considerably more complex and comprehensive process. Most often an interpretation necessitates additional data that are time consuming to collect and complicated to integrate into an overall model, for example borehole logs, borehole core samples, water chemistry, surface vegetation, satellite imagery plus all existing geological background knowledge. Interpretation basically has to do with identifying categories and finding boundaries between them so that depths, thicknesses and a whole range of other model attributes can be estimated, qualitatively and/or quantitatively. I present two methods using the continuous wavelet transform of finding attributes intended to assist the interpreter: one finds layer boundaries in the smooth multi‐layer models that are most often used in the inversion of large airborne electromagnetic data sets, and the other finds the natural categories of the model parameter. Naturally, being based on the subsurface conductivity distribution, the boundaries and categories suggested are useful only to the extent that they coincide with geological/hydrogeological boundaries and categories – which is for the interpreter to decide.