Base of salt inversion using triangular facets

Recovery of the base of salt is a well established procedure by inverting gravity, gravity gradiometry, or magnetic data. Typically the region is represented using 3-D juxtaposed vertical prisms on a rectilinear mesh whose depth extent act as the boundary between two units of differing density. Instead we propose to discretize the surface using an unstructured mesh with triangular base elements. This formulation has additional computational overheads compared with rectilinear meshes but the flexibility of the unstructured mesh allows for more accurate representation of known a priori structural surfaces. We discuss the forward modeling algorithm, discretization of the model objective function, and illustrate the performance using a synthetic salt example.