The effects of rough terrain on land‐based controlled‐source electromagnetic exploration using a long horizontal dipole source

Controlled source electromagnetics (CSEM) is an important tool for hydrocarbon exploration. It is of significant economic interest to transfer some of the concepts and recent successes of marine CSEM to a landbased setting. However, modeling CSEM responses with a grounded source on land requires several adaptations to existing software. The long-term purpose of our work is to develop a reliable forward model for land-based controlledsource electromagnetics which can be used to explore deep resistive hydrocarbon reservoirs in potentially rugged terrain in the presence of oilfield infrastructure and other cultural noise. At the current stage of development, we have adapted an existing finite element algorithm to calculate responses to long dipole excitation of a conducting subsurface with rough topography.