Enhancing Geophysical Applications with Electrical Resistivity Tomography Inversion : Uncovering the mysteries that lies beneath us

Abstract: Geophysical methods have been widely used to investigate the subsurface in various ap-plications, such as mineral exploration, geotechnical and environmental studies. Among these methods, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) has gained popularity due to its non-invasive and high-resolution capability in mapping subsurface resistivity variations. In this report, we provide an overview of the theoretical principles behind ERT and discuss its practical applications. We highlight the importance of inversion in ERT data processing and explain how different filtering methods and parameters can affect the results. Our investigation shows that running 2D and 3D inversion in a cloud service is more than feasible and that filtering can significantly reduce the error between the model and reality. We demonstrate that the error can be reduced to less than a 0.1 % in the tested dataset with careful parameter selection. Overall, our findings emphasize the potential of ERT as a powerful tool for subsurface characterization and shed light on its practical implementation for various geophysical applications.