Comparison between different inversion methods for ocean acoustic tomography (comparison on experimental data)

This study deals with the inverse problem in ocean acoustic tomography. Different inversion methods are compared on experimental data recorded for 15 days during the Thetis 2 Campaign. This experiment was carried out in 1994 in the Mediterranean Basin and used broadband signal that were received on a vertical array. The inversion methods use both ray and mode theory to estimate the environmental sound speed profile. This paper describe different inversion methods based on a modal decomposition of the sound speed profile (empirical orthogonal functions). Robustness, calculation cost and accuracy of the methods are compared. The interest of a time/space representation of the acoustic field to solve inversion problems is discussed