Abstract：Pole-pole electrical potential canbetransformed to apparent resistivity of any electrode arrangementby linear combination. However,itis impossible to avoid introducing noises into electrical potential in field survey and numerical forward modeling,which will cause uncertainty for apparent resistivity. In this paper,we discuss the effects of random potential error and error resulted from the numerical computation of 3-D finite-difference modeling on the apparent resistivity. The results show that even modest levels of noise in the polepole potential will cause big uncertainty for the apparent resistivity of dipole-dipole array,but the errorintheapparent resistivityofsymmetrical quadrupole array is not very large. The potential error resulted from the numerical computation also hasuncertainty for theapparentresistivitytoa certain extent. The points of view in the paper have been proved by the results of error analysis.
