Imaging quasi-layered conductive structures by simple processing of transient electromagnetic data

Abstract An 'imaged' conductivity section of a layered earth can be obtained by simple transformation of step-response electromagnetic data measured in the quasi-static zone. This method of data transformation is presented as an alternative to conventional apparent conductivity transformations. At each delay time, the variation of the step response as a function of geometry (transmitter and receiver location) is transformed to an equivalent reference depth h, which can be related to the depth of electromagnetic field diffusion. The behavior of h as a function of delay time is nearly independent of the source-receiver geometry. The slowness dt/dh divided by the magnetic permeability is almost exactly proportional to the cumulative conductance measured from the surface down to a depth h. Thus we can estimate an apparent conductivity, which we call the 'imaged conductivity,' at depth to be d 2 t/mu 0 dh 2 .The cost of this transformation is a fraction of the cost of conventional data inversion, and it does not require an a priori constraint on the number of parameters used in the inversion. The empirically developed technique was used successfully to process UTEM field data measured over a quasi-layered earth.