Geoacoustic inversion using ray-based blind deconvolution of shipping sources.

The ray-based blind deconvolution algorithm can provide an estimate of the channel impulse responses (CIRs) between a shipping source of opportunity and the elements of a receiving array by estimating the unknown phase of this random source through wideband beamforming along a well-resolved ray path. However, due to the shallow effective depth (typically <10m) and low frequency content (typically less than a few kHz) associated with shipping sources, the interfering direct and surface arriving pair and subsequent bottom and surface-bottom arrival pair cannot always be resolved in the CIR arrival-time structure. Nevertheless, this study demonstrates that the bottom reflection loss can be inferred from the ratio of the magnitude spectra of these two arrival pairs if a frequency-dependent correction (which can be purely data based) is applied to correct for the dipole source effect. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated to invert for the geoacoustic parameters of a soft-layer covering the ocean floor using a nonlinear least-square algorithm.