Infrasound data inversion for atmospheric sounding

Abstract

The International Monitoring System (IMS) of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) continuously records acoustic waves in the 0.01-10 Hz frequency band, known as infrasound. These waves propagate through the layered structure of the atmosphere. Coherent infrasonic waves are produced by a variety of anthropogenic and natural sources and their propagation is controlled by spatiotemporal variations of temperature and wind velocity. Natural stratification of atmospheric properties (e.g. temperature, density and winds) forms waveguides, allowing long-range propagation of infrasound waves. However, atmospheric specifications used in infrasound propagation modelling suffer from lack and sparsity of available data above an altitude of 50 km. As infrasound can propagate in the upper atmosphere up to 120 km, we assume that infrasonic data could be used for sounding the atmosphere, analogous to the use of seismic data to infer solid Earth structure and the use of hydroacoustic data to infer oceanic structure. We therefore develop an inversion scheme for vertical atmospheric wind profiles in the framework of an iterative linear inversion. The forward problem is treated in the high-frequency approximation using a Hamiltonian formulation and complete first-order ray perturbation theory is developed to construct the Fréchet derivatives matrix. We introduce a specific parametrization for the unknown model parameters based on Principal Component Analysis. Finally, our algorithm is tested on synthetic data cases spanning different seasonal periods and network configurations. The results show that our approach is suitable for infrasound atmospheric sounding on a regional scale.