Developing a near surface electrical resistivity model of Great Britain

This study presents a new electrical resistivity model for the near surface geology of Great Britain. It describes the first known national model of electrical resistivity at 1:50k scale. Due to the paucity of measured in situ electrical resistivity data a modeling scheme is adopted to attribute the spatial compilation. The British Geological Survey’s (BGS) National Geotechnical Database (Self, 2012) is utilized to derive synthetic modeled resistivity distributions for all of the lithostratigraphic units described in the near surface geological model of Great Britain. Resistivity values are calculated using an effective medium algorithm (Berg, 2007) and the central moments of the statistical distributions are used to populate the map. Alongside this primary output, the expected range of resistivity is derived from the difference between the 20th and the 80th percentiles of the distributions.