Acoustic inversion of bottom reflectivity and bottom sound speed profile in shallow water

A full field inversion technique is presented which uses a broadband source and an easily deployable array to estimate bottom sound speed and bottom reflectivity. The technique is a modified matched field inversion technique referred to as matched beam processing. Matched beam processing uses conventional beamforming to transform the field data into the beam domain and correlate that with the replica beam. This allows the analysis to track the acoustic field as a function of incidence/reflected angle and minimize contamination or mismatch due to sidelobe leakage. This technique is illustrated with simulated data for a vertical array and can be generalized to other array configuration, such as a towed array