Geoacoustic inversion with ships as sources

Estimation of geoacoustic parameters using acoustic data from a surface ship was performed for a shallow water region in the Gulf of Mexico. The data were recorded from hydrophones in a bottom mounted, horizontal line array (HLA). The techniques developed to produce the geoacoustic inversion are described, and an efficient method for geoacoustic inversion with broadband beam cross-spectral data is demonstrated. The performance of cost functions that involve coherent or incoherent sums over frequency and one or multiple time segments is discussed. Successful inversions for the first sediment layer sound speed and thickness and some of the parameters for the deeper layers were obtained with the surface ship at nominal ranges of 20, 30, or 50 water depths. The data for these inversions were beam cross-spectra from four subapertures of the HLA spanning a little more than two water depths. The subaperture beams included ten frequencies equally spaced in the 120–200 Hz band. The values of the geoacoustic parameters from the inversions are validated by comparisons with geophysical observations and with the parameter values from previous inversions by other invesigators, and by comparing transmission loss (TL) measured in the experiment with modeled TL based on the inverted geoacoustic parameters.