Oceanic sound speed profile inversion

A modal (full-wave) method has been developed to predict ocean sound speed profiles from propagated acoustic field data. The method assumes a point source of sound in the ocean and uses as data the values of the transmitted acoustic field at an array. The formalism for depth-dependent sound speeds consists of the standard Hankel integral transform of the depth solution. In the travel length coordinate, the latter is written exactly, using the Green´s function, in terms of an integral equation whose kernel includes the sound speed profile correction. A Born approximation to this equation is used. This is just the WKB solution, and permits the use of a nontrivial input (or guess) profile, here chosen as bilinear. The use of asymptotic methods enables us to write the data as an integral transform over the profile correction. The transform can be inverted. An example is presented for full-bandwidth inversion.