A protocol for assessing the effectiveness of electrical resistivity imaging for agricultural dike investigation

DC electrical resistivity surveying has shown much promise for investigating dikes and other earthen flood barriers. We are interested in the applicability of such data for aiding with maintenance and construction efforts in the Tantramar region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, where agricultural dikes form an important part of critical flood prevention infrastructure. Specifically, our goal is to develop efficient field survey and data processing protocols for detecting possible internal issues in the dikes ahead of further, more detailed geophysical surveying. The field survey protocol must be cost and time effective, given the large lengths of dikes that must be surveyed. The Tantramar dikes are expected to exhibit strong subsurface heterogeneity but accurately characterizing their internal structure may be challenging. Dikes have significant 3D geometry and traditional 2D DC surveying, and subsequent 2D inversion, fails to provide reliable and interpretable results. 3D surveying and inversion may be required but this represents significantly higher field costs. We performed a detailed synthetic inverse modelling study to help design our field surveying protocols. We used a representative model of a dike in the Tantramar region and we worked with the specifics of the surveying equipment available to us. We investigated and compared three possible data acquisition layouts proposed by other authors, we thoroughly compared the results of 2D versus 3D inversion on those layouts, and we performed a detailed investigation to assess best practices for 3D inversion mesh design. We are also incorporating joint interpretation with EM data, collected using mobile survey devices such as the Geonics EM31. Results from synthetic forward and inverse modelling are helping us develop future field data collection, processing and modelling protocols.