Development of a three-dimensional all-at-once inversion approach for the magnetotelluric method

A three-dimensional inversion was implemented for magnetotellurics, which is a passive electromagnetic method in geophysics. It exploits natural electromagnetic fields of the Earth, which function as sources. Their interaction with the conductive parts of the subsurface are registered when components of the electric and the magnetic field are measured and evaluated. The all-at-once approach is an inversion scheme that is relatively new to geophysics. In this approach, the objective function – the basis of each inversion – is called the Lagrangian. It consists of three parts: (i) the data residual norm, (ii) the regularisation part, and (iii) the forward problem. The latter is the significant difference to conventional inversion approaches that are built up of a forward calculation part and an inversion part. In the case of all-at-once, the forward problem is incorporated in the objective function and is therefore already taken into account in each inversion iteration. Thus, an explicit forward calculation is obsolete. As an objective function, the Lagrangian shall reach a minimum and therefore its first and second derivatives are evaluated. Hence, the gradient of the Lagrangian and its Hessian are constituent parts of the KKT system – the Newton-type system that is set up in the all-at-once inversion. Conventional inversion approaches avoid the Hessian because it is a large, dense, not positive definite matrix that is challenging to handle. However, it provides additional information to the inversion, which raises hope for a high quality inversion result. As a first step, the inversion was programmed for the more straightforward one-dimensional magnetotelluric case. This was particularly suitable to become familiar with sQMR – a Krylov subspace method which is essential for the three-dimensional case to be able to work with the Hessian and the resulting KKT system. After the implementation and validation of the one-dimensional forward operator, the Lagrangian and its derivatives were set up to complete the inversion, which successfully solved the KKT system. Accordingly, the three-dimensional forward operator also needed to be implemented and validated, which was done using published data from the 3D-2 COMMEMI model. To realise the inversion, the Lagrangian was assembled and its first and second derivatives were validated with a test that exploits the Taylor expansion. Then, the inversion was initially programmed for the Gauss-Newton approximation where second order information is neglected. Since the system matrix of the Gauss-Newton approximation is positive definite, the solution of this system of equations could be carried out by the conventional solver pcg. Based on that, the complete KKT system (Newton\\\'s method) was set up and preconditioned sQMR solved this system of equations