Geostatistical Electromagnetic Inversion for Landfill Characterization

Summary With an increasingly awareness for climate-smart consumption and production of natural resources, the characterization of landfill deposits has been subject to recent scientific and economic interest. Conventional methods for landfills modelling are based on a limited number of discrete observations with limitations in spatial characterization, however near-surface geophysical surveys, such as frequency-domain electromagnetic (FDEM) induction methods, are emerging as complementary and powerful tool to characterize landfill deposits. In this work, we present a geostatistical inversion technique, based on an iterative procedure, able for the simultaneous inversion of FDEM data (both in-phase and quadrature-phase) for electrical conductivity (EC) and magnetic susceptibility (MS), generated with stochastic sequential simulation and co-simulation, which optimize the landfill modelling procedure and is sensitive towards change on the physical properties of interest. The use of this geostatistical electromagnetic inversion allows for a more detailed description of the spatial distribution of the EC and MS and the associated uncertainty and provides a flexible framework for data integration. We successfully applied and validated our method to a synthetic and a real data set.