A workflow for cooperative inversion of seismic and magnetotelluric data

Abstract

We present a cooperative inversion approach for acoustic impedance using seismic and magnetotelluric data. In this approach, the magnetotelluric data, sensitive to the resistivity of rocks are used to get the large scale background spatial trends of the acoustic impedance model, while the seismic data are used to get the small-scale features. The connections between resistivity and elastic properties of rocks are obtained from petrophysical relationships derived from borehole data. Structural constraints derived from seismic are used to improve the magnetotelluric inversion. We present an application of this technique to synthetic data derived from previous interpretation of seismic and magnetotelluric models in a mineral province. The synthetic example shows how an improved result is obtained using our cooperative inversion workflow.