Joint full-waveform ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity inversion applied to field data acquired on the surface

We exploit the different but complementary data sensitivities of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity (ER) by applying a multiphysics, multiparameter, simultaneous 2.5D joint inversion without invoking petrophysical relationships. Our method joins full-waveform inversion (FWI) GPR with adjoint derived ER sensitivities on the same computational domain. We incorporate a stable source estimation routine into the FWI-GPR. We apply our method in a controlled alluvial aquifer using only surface-acquired data. The site exhibits a shallow groundwater boundary and unconsolidated heterogeneous alluvial deposits. We compare our recovered parameters to individual FWI-GPR and ER results, and we compare them to log measurements of capacitive conductivity and neutron-derived porosity. Our joint inversion provides a more representative depiction of subsurface structures because it incorporates multiple intrinsic parameters, and it is therefore superior to an interpretation based on log data, FWI-GPR, or ER alone.