GJI Geomagnetism, rock magnetism and palaeomagnetism

We present a new approach for 2-D magnetotelluric forward numerical modelling in contrast to traditional numerical methods like finite elements or finite differences. The method used for solving the partial differential equations is based on amesh-free technique which does not need an underlaying mesh or grid. We use the Meshless Local Petrov–Galerkin (MLPG) method in combination with radial basis functions to simulate the response of a given conductivity model to a plane-wave source. We compare the mesh-free solution with known simulation programs and simple analytical solutions. Furthermore, we discuss the new magnetotelluric modelling method in terms of implementation and stability. First, we study the convergence and discretization errors of the newmethod with a simple half-space conductivity model. Then we compare our mesh-free simulation results with simple 2-D conductivity models with the results of a well-known finite element program. In the end, we provide a smooth conductivity model calculated with the mesh-free approach. The modelling results, even with randomly distributed nodes, are in a good agreement with those obtained by the finite element method