Processing magnetotelluric data with modern statistical and numerical techniques

Abstract

Magnetotelluric impedances are estimated from electric and magnetic field data using a Kalman filtering method. Unlike most of the methods currently used in processing magnetotelluric data, this technique is a time-domain method which uses a linear, discrete-time filter to recursively obtain estimates of ground response. A three-step procedure is proposed, which allows the incorporation of remote reference data. The Kalman filtering technique is applied to the "active interval" subset of the standard EMSLAB magnetotelluric dataset, and the results are found to be comparable with those from other commonly used analysis methods for magnetotelluric data.