Optimized perimeter arrays for 3D resistivity survey in urban areas: a comparison with standard L and Corner arrays

Summary In highly populated areas, the 3D resistivity surveys are limited by many physical obstructions and it is not possible to use normally implanted electrodes in a rectangular grid in such cases. Therefore, an alternative special 3D survey case is when the electrodes are confined to the perimeter of the survey area. Thus, many approaches have been proposed for such case. In this work, the performance of the optimized perimeter arrays and a new improvement of these arrays in case of adding the noisy-weight to the algorithm were demonstrated and compared with the conventional L and Corner arrays using two synthetic examples. the optimized perimeter arrays achieve better resolution and structure detectability than 'L and Corner' array. In addition, there is a slight improvement with the noise-weights optimized data set in terms of reflects a slightly higher resistivity values and lowest model misfit. It is noted that the horizontal resolution is better than the vertical resolution.