Focalization in the Gulf of Mexico

Matched-field processing (MFP) has been an active area of research in the last decade for estimating the location of a sound source and parameters related to the ocean channel. MFP yields estimates of the unknown parameters by matching the true received acoustic field to the theoretically predicted field calculated for sets of likely values for the unknown parameters. Successful demonstrations of the application of MFP to real data have been limited. Here, MFP is shown to provide both successful localization and focusing of the environment (`focalization') with real data collected in the Gulf of Mexico. The estimation is done by maximizing the correlation between the received and expected signals using simulated annealing