Three-dimensional inversion of magnetotelluric data from the Coso Geothermal Field, based on a finite difference Gauss-Newton method parallelized on a multicore workstation

An existing 3-D magnetotelluric (MT) inversion program written for a single processor personal computer (PC) has been modified and parallelized using OpenMP, in order to run the program efficiently on a multicore workstation. The program uses the Gauss-Newton inversion algorithm based on a staggered-grid finite-difference forward problem, requiring explicit calculation of the Frechet derivatives. The most time-consuming tasks are calculating the derivatives and determining the model parameters at each iteration. Forward modeling and derivative calculations are parallelized by assigning the calculations for each frequency to separate threads, which execute concurrently. Model parameters are obtained by factoring the Hessian using the LDLT method, implemented using a block-cyclic algorithm and compact storage.;MT data from 102 tensor stations over the East Flank of the Coso Geothermal Field, California are inverted. Less than three days are required to invert the dataset for ∼ 55,000 inversion parameters on a 2.66 GHz 8-CPU PC with 16 GB of RAM. Inversion results, recovered from a halfspace rather than initial 2-D inversions, qualitatively resemble models from massively parallel 3-D inversion by other researchers and overall, exhibit an improved fit. A steeply west-dipping conductor under the western East Flank is tentatively correlated with a zone of high-temperature ionic fluids based on known well production and lost circulation intervals. Beneath the Main Field, vertical and north-trending shallow conductors are correlated with geothermal producing intervals as well.