Data Processing: Electrical Resistivity Tomography

Heritage-UC5Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) comprises one of the most important modern techniques of near surface applied geophysics. The method has met an increasing interest within the geophysical community due to its robustness and applicability in solving diverse problems related to: a) the mapping of geological formations and stratigraphy; b) the identification of underground zones related to water and mineral resources and geothermal activity; c) the detection of pollution zones and pollutants that flow in the earth’s subsurface; d) the extraction of quantitative information for buried archaeological relics; and, e) the spatial and temporal monitoring of the subsurface resistivity. The last twenty years the wide use of ERT in numerous cases has been facilitated by the development of the technology related with fully automatically multiplexed electrode arrangements and automatic measuring systems. These technological advancements make possible to acquire a large volume of data in limited time periods, the analysis of and access to these large-scale data repositories can benefit greatly by the use of HPC. Further, a HPC facility would enable the integration of cross-discipline data and facilitate automated resistivity modeling and inversion schemes that aim to construct an estimate of a subsurface resistivity distribution, which is consistent with the experimental data.