3-D Inversion of gravity gradiometer data

We present the development of an algorithm for inverting multi-component gravity gradiometer data to recover three-dimensional (3-D) distributions of density contrast for salt imaging. The algorithm is a direct adaptation of the author’s earlier work on 3-D inversion of magnetic data. The underlying method is based upon a regularized inversion that constructs a density contrast distribution having minimum structure, and the inverse solution is obtained by minimizing a model objective function subject to the data and bound constraints on the model. Because of the mathematical equivalence between the magnetic data and the gravity gradiometer data, much of the magnetic algorithm is directly applicable to the inversion of gravity gradiometer data. However, there remain a number of issues that are unique to the gradiometer data and to the problem of salt imaging. This paper presents the general algorithm and then focuses on different algorithmic aspects to deal with its application.