Geoelectric experimental design — Efficient acquisition and exploitation of complete pole-bipole data sets

Exploiting the information content offered by geoelectric data in an efficient manner requires careful selection of the electrode configurations to be used. This can be achieved using sequential experimental design techniques proposed over the past few years. However, these techniques become impractical when large-scale 2D or 3D experiments have to be designed. Even if sequential experimental design were applicable, acquisition of the resulting data sets would require an unreasonably large effort using traditional multielectrode arrays. We present a new, fully parallelized pole-bipole measuring strategy by which large amounts of data can be acquired swiftly. Furthermore, we introduce a new experimental design concept that is based on “complete” data sets in terms of linear independence. Complete data sets include a relatively small number of basis electrode configurations, from which any other configuration can be reconstructedby superposition. The totality of possible configurations is referred to as the...