An acoustic tomography method for imaging ocean structure with reverberated waves

Abstract

Seismic wide-angle imaging using ship-towed acoustic sources and networks of ocean-bottom seismographs is a common technique for exploring earth structure beneath oceans. In these studies, the recorded data are dominated by acoustic waves propagating as reverberations in the water column. Ignored by the earth scientist, this data offer an alternative approach for determining the structure of the oceans and advancing understanding of ocean heat content and mixing processes. A method, referred to as ocean acoustic reverberation tomography, is developed that uses the traveltimes of reverberated waves to image ocean acoustic structure. To demonstrate the feasibility of applying this method to existing and future data collected as part of marine seismic studies, a synthetic example is devised and the maximum resolution of the method is explored in the presence of different levels of data noise. Reverberation tomography offers significant improvement over classical ocean tomography in that it can produce images...