Benchmarking geoacoustic inversion methods for range-dependent waveguides

Inversion methods have been developed over the past decade to extract information about unknown ocean-bottom environments from acoustic field data. This paper summarizes results from the Office of Naval Research/Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) Geoacoustic Inversion Techniques Workshop, which was designed to benchmark present-day inversion methods. The format of the workshop was a blind test to estimate unknown geoacoustic profiles by inversion of synthetic acoustic field data. The fields were calculated using a high-angle parabolic approximation and verified using coupled normal modes for three range-dependent shallow-water test cases: a monotonic slope; a shelf break; and a fault intrusion in the sediment. Geoacoustic profiles were generated to simulate sand, silt, and mud sediments in these environments. Several different approaches for inverting the acoustic field data were presented at the workshop: model-based matched-field methods; perturbation methods; methods using transmission loss data; and methods using horizontal array information. An effective inversion must provide both an estimate of the bottom parameters and a measure of the uncertainty of the estimated values. New methods were presented at the workshop to formalize the measure of uncertainty in the inversion. Comparisons between the different inversions are discussed in terms of a metric-based transmission loss calculated using the inverted profiles. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of present-day inversion techniques and indicate the limits of their capabilities for range-dependent waveguides.