Time domain geoacoustic inversion using ship noise

A time domain geoacoustic inversion method using ship noise received on a towed horizontal array is presented. The received signal, containing ship noise, is time-reversed and then back-propagated to the vicinity of the ship. The back-propagated signal is correlated with the received signal which is expected to peak at the ship´s location in case of a good match for the environment. This match is utilized for the geoacoustic parameter inversion. The objective function for this optimization problem is thus defined as the normalized power focused in an area around the source position, using a matched impulse response filter. The GA optimization method is applied to the global search problem. The inversion method is first applied to synthetic data and later to experimental data of MAPEX 2000, conducted north of the island of Elba.