3D Gravity Inversion on Unstructured Grids

Abstract

Compared with structured grids, unstructured grids are more flexible to model arbitrarily shaped structures. However, based on unstructured grids, gravity inversion results would be discontinuous and hollow because of cell volume and depth variations. To solve this problem, we first analyzed the gradient of objective function in gradient-based inversion methods, and a new gradient scheme of objective function is developed, which is a derivative with respect to weighted model parameters. The new gradient scheme can more effectively solve the problem with lacking depth resolution than the traditional inversions, and the improvement is not affected by the regularization parameters. Besides, an improved fuzzy c-means clustering combined with spatial constraints is developed to measure property distribution of inverted models in both spatial domain and parameter domain simultaneously. The new inversion method can yield a more internal continuous model, as it encourages cells and their adjacent cells to tend to the same property value. At last, the smooth constraint inversion, the focusing inversion, and the improved fuzzy c-means clustering inversion on unstructured grids are tested on synthetic and measured gravity data to compare and demonstrate the algorithms proposed in this paper.

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