Ocean cold water mass is an oceanographic phenomena that oceanographers concerned many years. Method of monitoring the cold water mass is a problem to be solved urgently. A new tomography approach, modal wave-number tomography (MWNT), is proposed for monitoring the cold water mass and numerical simulation is carried out for Yellow sea cold water mass. The perturbation theory is used to invert the coefficients of empirical orthogonal functions of sound speed profile (SSP) from the local modal wave number perturbation. The numerical simulation shows that the modal wave number tomography can invert average SSP, in particular, is of potential to monitoring range dependent SSP structure.