The concept of the "geoelectrical trace

The recent development of multi-electrode DC equipment has made fast and extensive measurements possible, allowing new applications of DC resistivity measurements in civil engineering, environmental and archaeological investigations. With a modern multi-electrode De equipment a large variety of electrode configurations can easily be measured. Sensitivity analysis has proved to be able in preselection of those electrode configurations with a high resolution power [1]. The application of sensitivity analysis also shows that a high resolution power of an electrode configuration is often correlated with a high sensitivity in terms of disturbance of the measurement value. The disturbance can be caused e.g. by induced polarization potential at the eIectrodes or by leakage currents from industry. For an improvement of the data quality of electrode configurations the concept of the "geoelectrical trace" is introduced.