Revista Brasileira de Geofísica

The inversion of vertical electrical sounding (VES) is normally performed considering a stratified medium formed by homogeneous, isotropic and horizontal layers. The simplicity of this geophysical model makes the inversion simple and computationally fast, and together with the main characteristics of the electroresistivity method, it was greatly responsible to make VES one of the most popular geophysical method for groundwater exploration and engineering geophysics. However, even in a sedimentary basin where the geology is more conform, the assumption of horizontal and homogeneous layers is not necessarily valid, limiting the reliability of the inversion results. In this paper we present a fast and robust 2D resistivity modeling and inversion algorithm for the interpretation of sets of VES. We consider three inversion algorithms: the Gauss-Newton method of linearized inversion (LI), the genetic algorithm (GA), and a hybrid approach (GA-LI) that uses LI to improve the best model at the end of each step of the GA. The medium parametrization consists of the partition of the domain into fixed homogeneous rectangular blocks such that their resistivities are the only free parameters. The apparent resistivity is evaluated by an iterative scheme that is derived from a finite-difference discretization of the potential differential equation. We enhance the convergence rate of the scheme by adopting an incomplete Cholesky preconditioner. Numerical results using synthetic and real 2D apparent resistivity data formed by sets of VES for the Schlumberger configuration illustrate the performance of the hybrid GA-LI algorithm. The VES field data were acquired near Conceição do Coité, state of Bahia, Brazil. We compare the performance of the LI, GA and GA-LI algorithms