In conventional inversion schemes of magnetotelluric data by the linearized least-square method with a smooth constraint, a smoothing parameter, α contributes to all of the electrical resistivity blocks in the smooth constraint term evenly. Therefore, it is difficult to reconstruct a resistivity structure with sharp structural boundaries using the conventional inversion, although subsurface formations including both smooth and sharp structural changes are often targets of magnetotelluric surveys. In this paper, we propose a new two-dimensional inversion algorithm for magnetotelluric data to reconstruct the resistivity structure with both smooth resistivity variations and a sharp boundary. Our inversion scheme needs the location of sharp boundary as a priori information from the other geophysical surveys, such as seismic reflection method. A new hyper-parameter “β” between 0 and 1 is defined for expression of sharpness of the structural boundary. As β becomes 0 to 1, the resistivity variation across the assumed boundary becomes sharp to smooth. Two hyper-parameters are determined using the ABIC-minimizing scheme with a new simple way for searching optimized hyper-parameters efficiently. We applied both conventional and new sharp-boundary inversion to synthetic magnetotelluric data from two models. One model includes high and low resistivity anomalies, and another model consists of layers increasing their resistivity gradually. As a result of the synthetic tests, our sharp-boundary inversion reconstructed the resistivity structure with sharp boundary, if the location of sharp boundary is assigned at the proper position. Even if the sharp boundary is assigned within the smooth structure area wrongly, smooth model is obtained properly. After synthetic tests, we apply this sharp boundary inversion to field data obtained around the seafloor of the Nankai Trough using high-frequency ocean bottom electromagnetometer. The top of Philippine Sea plate, confirmed by a seismic reflection survey, is adopted as a location of sharp boundary in our inversion. As the result of our sharp-boundary inversion, the top of Philippine Sea plate is reconstructed as a sharp structural boundary. We conclude that our sharp-boundary inversion provides more realistic resistivity model compared with the smooth model by the conventional inversion.
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