Induced Polarization Effects in Electromagnetic data: the Loupe case study

It is nowadays accepted, both in industry and in academy, that Induced Polarization (IP) affects electromagnetic (EM) data, when these are collected over a medium characterized by strong IP properties. With this study we want to verify if and how IP effects are detectable also by the new ground-EM system Loupe. The Loupe system is a two-operator walkable transient EM (TEM) profiling system designed to image the electrical properties of the ground with a high lateral and vertical resolution. In order to map the IP effects, we set up a large data space and model space analysis, parametrizing a two-layer synthetic model and calculating thousands of forward responses varying the model’s parameters. We thus compare the forward responses affected by IP with the equivalent purely-resistive ones. We find that significant IP effects are present on most models, also with moderate polarization properties.