There are currently three types of algorithms in use for regularized 2-D inversion of magnetotelluric (MT) data. All seek to minimize some functional which penalizes data misfit and model structure. With the most straight‐forward approach (exemplified by OCCAM), the minimization is accomplished using some variant on a linearized Gauss‐Newton approach. A second approach is to use a descent method [e.g., nonlinear conjugate gradients (NLCG)] to avoid the expense of constructing large matrices (e.g., the sensitivity matrix). Finally, approximate methods [e.g., rapid relaxation inversion (RRI)] have been developed which use cheaply computed approximations to the sensitivity matrix to search for a minimum of the penalty functional. Approximate approaches can be very fast, but in practice often fail to converge without significant expert user intervention. On the other hand, the more straightforward methods can be prohibitively expensive to use for even moderate‐size data sets. Here, we present a new and much more efficient variant on the OCCAM scheme. By expressing the solution as a linear combination of rows of the sensitivity matrix smoothed by the model covariance (the “representers”), we transform the linearized inverse problem from the M-dimensional model space to the N-dimensional data space. This method is referred to as DASOCC, the data space OCCAM’s inversion. Since generally N ≪ M, this transformation by itself can result in significant computational saving. More importantly the data space formulation suggests a simple approximate method for constructing the inverse solution. Since MT data are smooth and “redundant,” a subset of the representers is typically sufficient to form the model without significant loss of detail. Computations required for constructing sensitivities and the size of matrices to be inverted can be significantly reduced by this approximation. We refer to this inversion as REBOCC, the reduced basis OCCAM’s inversion. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real data sets with REBOCC, DASOCC, NLCG, RRI, and OCCAM show that REBOCC is faster than both DASOCC and NLCG, which are comparable in speed. All of these methods are significantly faster than OCCAM, but are not competitive with RRI. However, even with a simple synthetic data set, we could not always get RRI to converge to a reasonable solution. The basic idea behind REBOCC should be more broadly applicable, in particular to 3-D MT inversion.
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