An efficient regularization method for a large scale ill-posed geothermal problem

Abstract

The inverse geothermal problem consists of estimating the temperature distribution below the earth's surface using measurements on the surface. The problem is important since temperature governs a variety of geologic processes, including the generation of magmas and the deformation style of rocks. Since the thermal properties of rocks depend strongly on temperature the problem is non-linear. The problem is formulated as an ill-posed operator equation, where the righthand side is the heat-flux at the surface level. Since the problem is ill-posed regularization is needed. In this study we demonstrate that Tikhonov regularization can be implemented efficiently for solving the operator equation. The algorithm is based on having a code for solving a well-posed problem related to the above mentioned operator. The algorithm is designed in such a way that it can deal with both 2D and 3D calculations. Numerical results, for 2D domains, show that the algorithm works well and the inverse problem can be solved accurately with a realistic noise level in the surface data.