Ocean acoustic tomography using travel-time sensitivity kernel

Acoustic tomography uses acoustic field propagating in the ocean to monitor the properties of meso-scale ocean. Traditional acoustic tomography is based on ray theory. However, in the situation of low frequency, ray method may lead to low resolution and precision. Thus, we propose a method of travel time sensitivity kernel, which can realize the estimation of sound speed perturbation of arbitrary position in two nodes transmission precisely. Also the travel time sensitivity kernel method increases the observed quantity and the spatial resolution. First we study the theoretical derivation of travel time sensitivity kernel and then peak arrival detection and solution to the acoustic inverse problem as well. In this paper, we present a series of simulations of ocean acoustic tomography based on travel time sensitivity kernel. Comparison is made between ray method with the method, which illustrates the high resolution and high accuracy of the latter.