Shallow-Water Acoustic Tomography Performed From a Double-Beamforming Algorithm: Simulation Results

Recent shallow-water experiments in sea channels have been performed using two vertical coplanar densely sampled source and receive arrays. Applying a double-beamforming algorithm on the two arrays both on synthetic numerical simulations and on experimental data sets, we extract efficiently source and receive angles as well as travel times for a large number of acoustic rays that propagate and bounce in the shallow-water waveguide. We then investigate how well sound-speed variations in the waveguide are reconstructed using a ray time-delay tomography based on a Bayesian inversion formulation. We introduce both data and model covariance matrices and we discuss on the synthetic numerical example how to choose the a priori information on the sound-speed covariance matrix. We attribute the partial sound-speed reconstruction to the ray-based tomography and we suggest that finite-frequency effects should be considered as the vertical and horizontal size of the Fresnel zone significantly spreads in the waveguide. Finally, the contribution of a different set of ray angles for tomography goal is also presented.