Joint Inversion: One Mans Perspective

Summary Tremendous advances have been made in the last two decades in joint inversion of multiple data sets. Coupling of all forms of geophysical data and flow data have been demonstrated. Advances in methods to link the data sets and associated parameters, both by structural and rock-physics coupling approaches have been key to the impressive results currently being demonstrated. Looking forward it seems that applications of joint inversion to improve our reservoir flow models holds the largest benefit compared to other applications such as structural imaging. In the reservoir application, combining of both structural and rock-physics coupling in joint inversion of seismic, EM, gravity and flow data will undoubtedly be needed to maximize results. Advances in theory and compute power will lead to stochastic MCMC based sampling techniques as the preferred method for joint inversion. MCMC techniques ability to provide a global solution, the easy of incorporating multiple and desperate a priori information, and accurate uncertainty estimation will all drive the field toward stochastic approaches.