Three-dimensional transient electromagnetic inversion with optimal transport

Abstract Transient electromagnetic method (TEM), as one of the essential time-domain electromagnetic prospecting approaches, has the advantage of expedition, efficiency and convenience. In this paper, we study the transient electromagnetic inversion problem of different geological anomalies. First, Maxwell’s differential equations are discretized by the staggered finite-difference (FD) method; then we propose to solve the TEM inversion problem by minimizing the Wasserstein metric, which is related to the optimal transport (OT). Experimental tests based on the layered model and a 3D model are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed method.