3D stochastic gravity inversion using nonstationary covariances

Abstract

The flexibility of geostatistical inversions in geophysics is limited by the use of stationary covariances, which, implicitly and mostly for mathematical convenience, assumes statistical homogeneity of the studied field. For fields showing sharp contrasts due, for example, to faults or folds, an approach based on the use of nonstationary covariances for cokriging inversion was developed. The approach was tested on two synthetic cases and one real data set. Inversion results based on the nonstationary covariance were compared to the results from the stationary covariance for two synthetic models. The nonstationary covariance better recovered the known synthetic models. With the real data set, the nonstationary assumption resulted in a better match with the known surface geology.