Structural, petrophysical, and geological constraints in potential field inversion using the Tomofast-x v1.0 open-source code

Abstract

Abstract. The quantitative integration of geophysical measurements with data and information from other disciplines is becoming increasingly important in answering the challenges of undercover imaging and of the modelling of complex areas. We propose a review of the different techniques for the utilisation of structural, petrophysical, and geological information in single physics and joint inversion as implemented in the Tomofast-x open-source inversion platform. We detail the range of constraints that can be applied to the inversion of potential field data. The inversion examples we show illustrate a selection of scenarios using a realistic synthetic data set inspired by real-world geological measurements and petrophysical data from the Hamersley region (Western Australia). Using Tomofast-x's flexibility, we investigate inversions combining the utilisation of petrophysical, structural, and/or geological constraints while illustrating the utilisation of the L-curve principle to determine regularisation weights. Our results suggest that the utilisation of geological information to derive disjoint interval bound constraints is the most effective method to recover the true model. It is followed by model smoothness and smallness conditioned by geological uncertainty and cross-gradient minimisation.