Structural joint modeling of magnetotelluric data and Rayleigh wave dispersion curves using Pareto-based particle swarm optimization: an example to delineate the crustal structure of the southeastern part of the Biga Peninsula in western Anatolia

It is widely acknowledged that the joint inversion of magnetotelluric and seismological datasets enhances the quality of the crustal structure solution, even when the physical correlation between electrical resistivity and seismic velocity is weak or indirect. The structurally coupled joint inversion approach has received considerable attention over the past two decades for its ability to estimate such parameters by penalizing their cross-gradient vectors at similar spatial positions. Despite this interest, various structural couplings and different physical directions (incremental or decremental) have been partially overlooked. We hereby propose an approach for the joint inversion of magnetotelluric (MT) and Rayleigh wave dispersion (RWD) data to estimate uncorrelated parameters by integrating particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the Pareto optimality approach. We used the optimality framework of these methods to overcome the difficulties associated with traditional joint inversion algorithms and to obtain optimal solutions that account for both similar and contrasting physical sensitivities. The significant correlation between the inverted and synthetic models under both noise-free and noisy datasets, together with the consistent results obtained from comparison with a traditional derivative-based joint inversion algorithm, further strengthened our confidence in applying the proposed modeling approach to the field data from the southeastern Biga Peninsula, western Anatolia. The models inverted from the field data corroborate the efficacy of the presented method. A notable characteristic of the proposed methodology is its capacity to estimate uncorrelated physical parameters, such as electrical resistivity and seismic velocity, without the imposition of penalties. Therefore, the presented method not only offers advantages in joint inversion but also allows modelers to observe and analyze model parameters having different sensitivities that may indicate different physical directions.