Synthesizing magnetotelluric time series based on forward modeling

Abstract

The validity of magnetotelluric time-series processing methods has been lacking reasonable testing criteria. Since the time series synthesized by existing techniques are not fully derived from a given model, they are not reliable. In this paper, we present a novel approach to synthesize magnetotelluric time series based on forward modeling and the correspondence between frequency and time domain electromagnetic fields. In this approach, we obtain the electromagnetic response of two orthogonal polarization sources for a given model by magnetotelluric forward modeling, and simulate the randomness of the polarization of the natural field source by a linear combination of the two polarization sources. Based on the correspondence between the frequency and time domain electromagnetic fields, the electromagnetic fields obtained by forward modeling in the frequency domain are transformed into the time domain, and finally the time series are synthesized. The test results on 1D and 3D models validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the correctness of the procedure. After adding noise to the synthesized time series, we can test the performance of each method by comparing the results of the time series processing methods with the response of the given model. Therefore, the method presented in this paper can be used to construct standard magnetotelluric time series, which can be used as a carrier to construct synthetic data satisfying various noise distributions, and for the study of related methods. This method can also be used to synthesize time series of other frequency-domain electromagnetic methods.