CustEMx - Sustainable software for computational electromagnetics

Geophysical electromagnetic survey techniques are indispensable for the exploration of mineral, groundwater, geothermal, or hydrocarbon resources. CustEM is currently one of few open-source modeling tools for related 3D electromagnetic simulations worldwide. It provides the community with a general tool for modeling of CSEM, semi-airborne EM, TEM, and MT data. CustEM support general anisotropic petrophysical parameters, including the conductivity, the magnetic permeability, electric permittivity, and Cole-Cole parameters to simulate induced-polarization effects. The code also supports inversion of CSEM field data in combination with the inversion library pyGIMLi.

The options to develop and provide sustainable codes for numerical solutions are very limited in the framework of geophysical project proposals. In the context of a new research projected dealing with a quality-assured and re-usable software development, we aim to upgrade the code base to ensure the long-term sustainability by consistently addressing the FAIR4RS standards while also changing some fundamental underlying libraries as they are no longer actively supported. The final goal is to supply the community with the new library custEMx, including tools for meshing, visualization, data I/O, partly suppling graphical user interfaces as well as an extended library of tutorials, examples and community benchmarks.

We share the state of progress of the transition from custEM to custEMx and show validation results as well as first improvements of the new underlying software to outline new possibilities. We want to closely interact with the user community to ease and support the transition to custEMx, using conferences and workshops not only to inform the community of the progress but also to gather feedback, which will influence the ongoing software development.