Three-dimensional inversion of controlled-source audio-frequency magnetotelluric data based on unstructured fi nite-element method

We propose a new 3D inversion scheme to invert the near-and transition-zone data of CSAMT with topography accurately.In this new method,the earth was discretized into unstructured tetrahedra to fit the ragged topography and the vector fi nite-element method was adopted to obtain precise responses and good sensitivity.To simulate the attitude and shape of the transmitter,we divided a long-grounded transmitter into dipoles and integrated these dipoles to obtain good responses in the near-and transition-fi eld zones.Next,we designed an L2 norm-based objective functional and applied a standard quasi-Newton method as the optimization method to solve the inverse problem and guarantee steady convergence.We tested our 3D inversion method first on synthetic data and then on a field dataset acquired from select sites near Changbai Mountain,China.In both tests,the new inversion algorithm achieved excellent fitting between the predicted and observed data,even in near-and transition-fi eld zones,and the inversion results agreed well with the true model.These fi ndings reveal that the proposed algorithm is eff ective for 3D inversion of CSAMT data.