The advent of towed geo-electrical array surveying on water and land has resulted in datasets of magnitudeapproaching that of airborne electromagnetic surveying and most suited to 1D inversion. Robustness and completeautomation is essential if processing and reliable interpretation of such data is to be viable. Sharp boundaries such asriver beds and the top of saline aquifers must be resolved so use of smoothness constraints must be minimised. Suitableinversion algorithms must intelligently handle low signal-to-noise ratio data if conductive basement, that attenuates signal,electrode conguration has been coded. The noise-level aware inversion identies if conductive basement has attenuatedsignal levels so that they are below noise level, and models conductive basement where appropriate. Layers in the initialmodels are distributed to span the effective depths of each of the geo-electric array quadrupoles. The algorithm worksoptimallyondatacollectedusinggeo-electricarrayswithanapproximatelyexponentialdistributionofquadrupoleeffectivedepths.Inversionofdatafromarrayswithlinearelectrodes,usedtoreducecontactresistance,andcapacitive-lineantennaeis plausible. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithm using theoretical examples and an example froma salt interception scheme on the Murray River, Australia.