Broad-band geoacoustic inversion in shallow water from waveguide impulse response measurements on a single hydrophone: Theory and experimental results

The paper discusses an inversion method that allows the rapid determination of in situ geoacoustic properties of the ocean bottom without resorting to large acoustic receiving apertures, synthetic or real. The method is based on broad-band waterborne measurements and modeling of the waveguide impulse response between a controlled source and a single hydrophone, Results from Yellow Shark '94 experiments in Mediterranean shallow waters using single elements of a vertical array are reviewed. Inversion of the bottom parameters is performed with an objective function that includes the processing gain of a model-based matched filter (MBMF) receiver relative to the conventional matched filter. The MBMF reference signals incorporate waveguide Green's functions for known geometry and water column acoustic model and hypothesized bottom geoacoustic models. The experimental inversion results demonstrated that, even for complex environmental conditions, a single transmission of a broad-band (200-800 Hz) coded signal received at a single depth and a few hundred forward modeling runs were sufficient to correctly resolve the bottom features. These included the sound speed profile, attenuation, density, and thickness of the top clay sediment layer, and sound speed and attenuation of the silty clay bottom. Exhaustive parameter search proved unequivocally the low-ambiguity and high-resolution properties of the MBMF-derived objective. The single-hydrophone results compare well with those obtained under identical conditions from matched held processing of multitone: pressure fields sampled on the vertical array. Both of these results agree with expectations from geophysical ground truth. The MBMF has been applied successfully to a field of advanced drifting acoustic buoys on the Western Sicilian shelf, demonstrating the general applicability of the inversion method presented in this paper.