Inversion Laboratory

Summary

Nodes - Lead nodes at University of Queensland and ANU

EIF funding - A$ 1.6 million

Project duration - January 2011 to December 2014

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are at the core of most forward models in Geosciences. Most material parameters are unknown and need to be determined by fitting model results to observational data by solving a PDE constrained optimization problem. In general, such a problem can be expressed as a system of PDEs which can be solved using standard PDE technology such as the finite element method.

We will build a generic toolkit to efficiently solve PDE constrained optimization problems. The toolkit will include (semi-)automatic software tools to construct the necessary system of PDEs and linearization. The toolkit will be built into the PDE modeling environment Escript which has already been developed under AuScope and will be integrated with generic and geophysical inversion software toolkit developed at ANU.

Infrastructure

Two classes of inversion software will be built

• The first will be applied to specific areas where AuScope has invested in data platforms such as seismic & MT imaging e.g. constraining the physical state of the continent, in situ-stress determination, calibration of geodynamic numerical models
• The second strand will be the construction of generic data inference tools which allow solution to user defined inversion problems, model building and uncertainty quantification.
  

Contacts

Lutz Gross – University of Queensland
Malcolm Sambridge - ANU

Last updated 5 September 2012