Geostatistical Seismic Inversion for Temperature and Salinity in the Madeira Abyssal Plain

Leonardo Azevedo,Luís Matias,Francesco Turco,Álvaro Peliz,Renan Tromm

doi:10.3389/fmars.2021.685007

Leonardo Azevedo, Luís Matias + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.685007

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Abstract

A two-dimensional multichannel seismic reflection profile acquired in the Madeira Abyssal Plain during June 2016 was used in a modeling workflow comprising seismic oceanography processing, geostatistical inversion and Bayesian classification to predict the probability of occurrence of distinct water masses. The seismic section was processed to image in detail the fine scale structure of the water column using seismic oceanography. The processing sequence was developed to preserve, as much as possible, the relative seismic amplitudes of the data and enhance the shallow structure of the water column by effectively suppressing the direct arrival. The migrated seismic oceanography section shows an eddy at the expected Mediterranean Outflow Water depths, steeply dipping reflectors, which indicate the possible presence of frontal activity or secondary dipping eddy structures, and strong horizontal reflections between intermediate water masses suggestive of double diffuse processes. We then developed and applied an iterative geostatistical seismic oceanography inversion methodology to predict the spatial distribution of temperature and salinity. Due to the lack of contemporaneous direct measurements of temperature and salinity we used a global ocean model as spatial constraint during the inversion and nearby contemporaneous ARGO data to infer the expected statistical properties of both model parameters. After the inversion, Bayesian classification was applied to all temperature and salinity models inverted during the last iteration to predict the spatial distribution of three distinct water masses. A preliminary interpretation of these probabilistic models agrees with the expected ocean dynamics of the region.

Highlights

Fine-scale ocean processes happening on ranges from a few meters to a few kilometers have a profound impact on turbulent dynamics, on the ocean energy budget, on primary production and ecosystems, on gas and tracer exchange, and on the global ocean circulation and climate (e.g., Wunsch and Ferrari, 2004; Mahadevan, 2016)
The workflow proposed in this work can be applied to other locations worldwide where no contemporaneous direct measurements of salinity and temperatures and global ocean models exist in the vicinity of the seismic profiles
The geostatistical Seismic oceanography (SO) inversion ran with six iterations, where at each iteration thirty-two pairs of temperature and salinity models were generated using direct sequential simulation (Soares, 2001) and direct sequential co-simulation with joint probability distributions (Horta and Soares, 2010)

Summary

Introduction

Fine-scale ocean processes happening on ranges from a few meters to a few kilometers have a profound impact on turbulent dynamics, on the ocean energy budget, on primary production and ecosystems, on gas and tracer exchange, and on the global ocean circulation and climate (e.g., Wunsch and Ferrari, 2004; Mahadevan, 2016). Geostatistical inversion has been successfully applied to predict the spatial distribution of ocean temperature and salinity from seismic oceanography data (Azevedo et al, 2018).

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