Laterally Constrained Inversion of TEMPEST Data from Eyre Peninsula Area, South Australia

Groundwater in the Eyre Peninsula of South Australia is scarce with potable resources limited to the western coastal margin and the southern tip of the peninsula. Consequently an understanding of their extent has become increasingly important particularly with demand being close to current extraction limits. In September 2006, about 1000 line km of TEMPEST AEM data were acquired over the Southern Eyre Peninsula, in order to assist in the definition of freshwater lens systems and in particular aquifer bounds associated with them as part of a resource definition project. Following their acquisition, the TEMPEST data set was analysed for data quality and then transformed into conductivity depth images (CDI) using EMFLOW (see Fitzpatrick and Munday, 2007). In an effort to better define to better define the geometry of specific bounding surfaces of hydrogeological relevance the TEMPEST data were inverted through the application of the laterally constrained inversion (LCI) technique. This paper describes the applied inversion methodology and the initial results from the first application of the LCI to data from a fixed wing AEM system.