Currently, most of MT （magnetotelluric） data are still collected on sparse survey lines and interpreted using 2D inversion methods because of the field work cost, the work area environment, and so on. However, there are some 2D interpretation limitations of the MT data from 3D geoelectrical structures which always leads to wrong geological interpretations. In this paper, we used the 3D inversion method to interpret the MT sparse lines data. In model testing, the sparse lines data are the MT full information data generated from a test model and processed using the 3D conjugate gradients inversion code. The inversion results show that this inversion method is reasonable and effective. Meanwhile, we prove that for inversion results with different element parameters, the results by joint inversion of both the impedance tensor data and the tipper data are more accurate and closer to the test model.
We developed a three-dimensional（3D） conjugate gradient inversion algorithm for in-verting magnetotelluric impedance tensor measurements.In order to show the importance of including diagonal components of magnetotelluric impedance tensor in 3D inversion,synthetic data were inverted using the 3D conjugate gradient inversion,and the inversion results were compared and analyzed.The results from the 3D inversion of synthetic data indicate that both the off-diagonal and the diagonal components are required in inversions to obtain better inversion results when there are no enough data sites to recover the target resistivity structure.These examples show that lots of information about 3D structure is also contained in the diagonal components;as a result,diagonal components should be in-cluded in 3D inversions.The inversion algorithm was also used to invert the impedance tensor data ac-quired in the Kayabe area in Japan.Inversions with the synthetic and real data demonstrated the va-lidity and practicability of the inversion algorithm.
