A novel approach for monitoring hydrothermal systems by continuous magnetotelluric observations

Understanding the behavior and the evolution of hydrothermal systems is of great interest for both scientific and commercial purposes, such as volcanic hazard assessment and geothermal energy exploitation. To this aim, a novel approach based on continuous magnetotelluric (MT) data is proposed for characterizing and monitoring hydrothermal systems. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a sensitivity analysis has been performed by simulating different evolution scenarios of a hydrothermal system and calculating the MT response at different time intervals corresponding to different stages of the system dynamics. The study proved to be essential for understanding the degree of sensitivity of the MT method to changes of the hydrothermal system with reference to its possible temporal evolutions.