Estimating geoacoustic parameters using matched-field inversion methods

In this paper, we use matched-field inversion methods to estimate the geoacoustic parameters for three synthetic test cases from the Geoacoustic Inversion Techniques Workshop held in May 2001 in Gulfport, MS. The objective of this work is to use a sparse acoustic data set to obtain estimates of the parameters as well as an indication of their uncertainties. The unknown parameters include the geoacoustic properties of the sea bed (i.e., number of layers, layer thickness, density, compressional speed, and attenuation) and the bathymetry for simplified range-dependent acoustic environments. The acoustic data used to solve the problems are restricted to five frequencies for a single vertical line array of receivers located at one range from the source. Matched-field inversion using simplex simulated annealing optimization is initially used to find a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimate. However, the ML estimate provides no information on the uncertainties or covariance associated with the model parameters. To estimate uncertainties, a Bayesian formulation of matched-field inversion is used to generate posterior probability density distributions for the parameters. The mean, covariance, and marginal distributions are determined using a Gibbs importance sampler based on the cascaded Metropolis algorithm. In most cases, excellent results were obtained for relatively sensitive parameters such as wave speed, layer thickness, and water depth. The variance of the estimates increase for relatively insensitive parameters such as density and wave attenuation, especially when noise is added to the data.