Magnetotelluric forward modelling in general anisotropic media using open-source package esys-escript

Abstract

Anisotropy in the electrical conductivity of the subsurface has been recognized as one of the major difficulties in interpreting Magnetotelluric (MT) data; as it can lead to inaccurate inversion results under simple isotropic assumption. A robust modelling code producing accurate simulation results for anisotropic cases is much needed for the MT community, in order to extract more information from MT data in the inversion process. We present open-source Python package esys-Escript. It is designed to solve mathematical modelling problems using the finite element method (FEM). Its key idea is to formulate the problem in terms of general partial differential equations (PDEs) with proper boundar..