Adjoint approach to the physical characterization of a shallow-water environment

In underwater acoustics a variety of different applications of adjoint models has been proposed in recent years. Adjoints have been derived for normal modes and for both the standard parabolic equation and Claerbout’s wide-angle approximation. This paper reviews the analytic nonlocal boundary control approach proposed in an earlier paper by the authors [Meyer & Hermand, ‘‘Optimal nonlocal boundary control of the wide-angle parabolic equation for inversion of a waveguide acoustic field,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 2937–2948 (2005)] and presents a numerical extension that allows direct inversion of the geoacoustic parameters that are embedded in a discrete representation of the nonlocal boundary condition at the water-sediment interface. The effectiveness of this numerical adjoint approach for the physical characterization of a shallow-water environment is illustrated with applications for geoacoustic inversion and ocean acoustic tomography. In particular, it is shown how a joint inversion across multiple frequencies can enhance the performance of the optimization process, especially for the case of a sparse receiver array spanning part of the water column. In an additional example we combine the two applications and discuss the feasibility of geoacoustic inversion in the presence of an uncertain sound-speed profile