Inversion of Pressure Data on a Vertical Array for Sea Floor Geoacoustic Properties

Estimation of the integral geoacoustic properties of the sea floor based on real data drawn from a shallow water site is presented. Two independent inversion schemes are used to deduce these properties. The first is matched-field processing of the pressure field on a vertical line array due to a projected source. The second approach is the inversion of ambient noise on a vertical array. Matched-field processing has shown to be successful in the inversion of high quality field data. Here, we show that it is also feasible with a more practical and less expensive data collection scheme. It will also be shown that low frequency inversion is more robust to variation and fluctuation in the propagating medium, whereas high frequencies are more sensitive to mismatches in a varying medium. A comparison is made of the estimates obtained from the two techniques and also with available historical data of the trial site.