The Geophysical Tomography Group was part of the

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (, ; abbr. IPGP) is a French governmental, non-profit research and higher education establishment located in Paris, dedicated to the study of earth and planetary sciences by combining observations, labora ...

(

Jussieu Campus The Jussieu Campus (''Campus de Jussieu'') or the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie Campus is a higher education campus located in the 5th arrondissement, Paris, 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the main campus of the Sorbonne Faculty of Science an ...

). During the years 1985-2000 it made developments in the domain of nonlinear fitting of seismic waveforms. The work of the group has been described as pioneering.

History

By the year 1985, the imaging methods used by the oil industry were based in signal-processing concepts, and it seemed that modern methods, based on careful waveform modeling and waveform fitting optimization were desirable. The team tried to make real-life demonstrations that the methods of inverse theory could be applied to the imaging problem typical of seismic exploration. The GTG was founded by

Albert Tarantola Albert Tarantola (June 15, 1949 – December 6, 2009), was a Spanish-born physicist of the University of Paris and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Institut de Physique du Globe (IPGP), and author of the book ''Probabilistic Formulation ...

, who authored an influential paper on the inversion of seismic reflection data.A. Tarantola
Inversion of seismic reflection data in the acoustic approximation
J. Geophysics 49, 1259 (1984). The GTG published work on fully nonlinear waveform fitting is possible on seismic exploration data, using elastic modeling and gradient-based optimization techniques (''adjoint methods''). The group's work in

Monte Carlo method Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be ...

for waveform fitting is being integrated in present-day developments.

References

{{authority control Research institutes in France Geophysical imaging