The recently introduced notion of peak arrivals [Athanassoulis and Ska
rsoulis, J. Acoust. Sec. Am. 97, 3575-3588 (1995)], defined as the sig
nificant local maxima of the arrival pattern, is studied here as a mod
eling basis for performing ocean tomography. Peak arrivals constitute
direct theoretical counterparts of experimentally observed peaks, and
offer a complete modeling of experimental observables, even in cases w
here ray or modal arrivals cannot be resolved. The coefficients of the
resulting peak-inversion system, relating travel-time with sound-spee
d perturbations, are explicitly calculated in the case of range-indepe
ndent environments using normal-mode theory. To apply the peak-inversi
on scheme to tomography the peak identification and tracking problem i
s examined from a statistical viewpoint; maximum-likelihood and least-
square solutions are derived and discussed. The particular approach ad
opted treats the identification and tracking problem in close relation
to the inversion procedure; all possibilities of associating observed
peaks with background arrivals are examined via trial inversions, and
the best peak identification is selected with respect to a least-squa
re criterion. The feasibility of peak tomography is subsequently demon
strated using first synthetic data and then measured data from the THE
TIS-I experiment. In the synthetic case the performance of the overall
scheme is found to be satisfactory both with noise-free and noisy dat
a. Furthermore, the identification, tracking, and inversion results us
ing experimental acoustic data from THETIS-I are in good agreement wit
h independent held observations. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of Americ
a.