Inversion in shallow-water using the WKB modal condition

In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme for extracting the complex bottom reflection coefficient (phase and amplitude) in a shallow water waveguide by using the WKB modal condition. The input data are the measured modal wavenumber (k/sub m/) and the modal attenuation (/spl beta//sub m/). The main advantages of this scheme are: 1) it is efficient, because there are no replica calculations as in the conventional matched field processing (MFP) scheme, 2) the inverted error induced by the "noise" of the contaminated data can be estimated analytically, and 3) the impact of the environmental (SSP) mismatch can also be estimated analytically. Numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed scheme works well in different scenarios of shallow water waveguides.