Acoustic inversion of bottom reflectivity and bottom sound-speed profile

Abstract

This paper applies a full-field technique to invert bottom sound profile and bottom reflectivity from simulated acoustic data in a shallow water environment. Bottom sound-speed profile and bottom reflectivity have been traditionally estimated using seismic reflection/refraction techniques when acoustic ray paths and travel time can be identified and measured from the data. However, in shallow water, the many multipaths due to bottom reflection/refraction make such identification and measurement rather difficult. A full-field inversion technique is presented here that uses a broad-band source and a vertical array for bottom sound-speed and reflectivity inversion. The technique is a modified matched field inversion technique referred to as matched beam processing. Matched beam processing uses conventional beamforming processing to transform the field data into the beam domain and correlate that with the replica field also in the beam domain. This allows the analysis to track the acoustic field as a function of incident/reflected angle and minimize contamination or mismatch due to sidelobe leakage.