Estimation of sea surface spectra using acoustic tomography

Abstract

Ocean acoustic tomography signals that interact with the ocean surface suffer travel time perturbations which have information on the frequency-direction spectrum of that surface. In this paper, a technique for tomographically estimating spatially varying frequency-direction spectra is introduced. To demonstrate this technique, synthetic signal spectra data were generated using an empirical model for a fetch-limited sea. The synthetic data were then inverted using linear inverse techniques to produce an estimate of the original sea surface spectra. Inverse solutions for both noise-free and noisy experiments are presented and discussed.