A higher-order tangent linear parabolic-equation solution of three-dimensional sound propagation

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2013. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134 (2013): EL251-EL257, doi:10.1121/1.4813852.A higher-order square-root operator splitting algorithm is employed to derive a tangent linear solution for the three-dimensional parabolic wave equation due to small variations of the sound speed in the medium. The solution shown in this paper unifies other solutions obtained from less accurate approximations. Examples of three-dimensional acoustic ducts are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the solution. Future work on the applications of associated adjoint models for acoustic inversions is proposed and discussed.This work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-13-1- 0026