Reducing the dimensionality of the joint inversion problem

A computer program product, comprising a non-transitory computer usable medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein, said computer readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method for exploring for hydrocarbons, said method comprising:

• reading into computer memory or data storage 3D data sets of at least two different types of geophysical data, each representing a common subsurface region;
• performing separate 3D inversions of each data type to obtain a 3D property model for each data type;
• synthesizing a 1D response of each 3D property model at one or more selected (x,y) locations to obtain 1D datasets that each conform to a 1D expression of a different 3D property model of one of the at least two different types of geophysical data;
• and
• jointly inverting the 1D datasets, each of which was synthesized from different 3D models, which correspond to the at least two different types of geophysical data, respectively, at each selected (x,y) location and displaying or downloading results.