PEAK TRACKING BY SIMULTANEOUS INVERSION - TOWARD A ONE-STEP ACOUSTIC TOMOGRAPHY ANALYSIS

A number of geophysical observing techniques, including ocean acoustic tomography, obtain sequences of records of which the observed relativ e maxima (''peaks'') are used to infer properties of the system via in versions. Traditionally, these peaks First are tracked (followed from one record to another) and identified separately, before they can be u sed in an inversion scheme. In this paper, a method is presented for i dentifying and tracking ensembles of such peaks in one step and simult aneously with rile inversion. a priori information, in our case knowle dge about the ocean, can thus be used to constrain the allowed peak id entifications; enabling the usage of irregularly appearing or more clo sely spaced peaks, The best identification is defined to be the one th at upon inversion minimizes a cost function that involves data residua l and smoothness in time, subject to two constraints bounding the solu tion and residual size. For the presented cases, the minimum can be fo und by simply trying inversions with all possible peak identifications . Sample applications of thr method from an acoustic tomography experi ment are shown in order to illustrate the approach and results.