Estimating uncertainties for geophysical tomography (Q1276149)

The authors present statistical and interval techniques for evaluating the uncertainties associated with geophysical tomographic inversion problems, including estimation of data errors, model errors, and total solution uncertainties. These techniques are applied to the inversion of traveltime data collected in a cross well seismic experiment. The inversion method uses the conjugate gradient technique, incorporating expert knowledge of data and model uncertainty to stabilize the solution. The technique produced smaller uncertainty than previous tomographic inversion of the data. A case study is presented in Section 2 and a brief description of another case study (earthquake engineering) is given in the Appendix.