A numerical adjoint parabolic equation (PE) method for tomography and geoacoustic inversion in shallow water

Recently, an analytic adjoint-based method of optimal nonlocal boundary control has been proposed for inversion of a waveguide acoustic field using the wide-angle parabolic equation [Meyer and Hermand, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 2937–2948 (2005)]. In this paper a numerical extension of this approach is presented that allows the direct inversion for the geoacoustic parameters which are embedded in a spectral integral representation of the nonlocal boundary condition. The adjoint model is generated numerically and the inversion is carried out jointly across multiple frequencies. The paper further discusses the application of the numerical adjoint PE method for ocean acoustic tomography. To show the effectiveness of the implemented numerical adjoint, preliminary inversion results of water sound-speed profile and bottom acoustic properties will be shown for the YELLOW SHARK ’94 experimental conditions