Geoacoustic inversion the Buckingham way

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of Mike’s research on geoacoustic inversion for characterization of sea bed sediments. First is his paper in 1987 that reported the use of vertical coherence of ambient ocean noise for estimating critical angles of sea bed sediment. Apart from the novel use of ambient noise as a sound source, his work opened the idea to make use of information about the ocean bottom contained in spatial phase relationships in vertical hydrophone array data. The practice was quickly adapted and widely applied as matched field inversion. However, the inversions were generally carried out using visco-elastic theory of sound propagation, an approach that is not the most appropriate for applications with porous sediment material. Mike’s next contribution addressed this issue in his series of papers starting around 1997 on the grain-shearing and viscous grain-shearing models of sound propagation in porous media. His theory provided a physical basis for the model parameters that are used to describe the interaction of sound with porous sediment media in geoacoustic inversions. Recent examples are shown that indicate how these innovations have become standard practice in geoacoustic inversions.