Geoacoustic inversion using MFP

Geoacoustic inversion is a topic of much interest in the underwater acoustics community these days. Shallow water geoacoustic properties include water depth, sediment layer thicknesses, sediment sound-speed profiles, density profiles, and attenuations. It is not only difficult to explicitly "measure" some of these parameters directly, it is also impossible to survey any region extensively. Thus, inversion methods which are non-invasive and which can rapidly and efficiently estimate properties over a volume are very desirable. Over the past decade the effort to develop such schemes has grown, particularly those which are MFP (matched field processing) based, i.e., which compare measured acoustic data on an array with model predictions for such data and which are sensitive to and based on environmental inputs. This presentation will briefly survey some workshops and more definitively discuss progress in a tomographic method presently under development.