Inversion of pressure data on a vertical array for sea floor geoacoustic properties

Estimation of the integral geoacoustic properties of the sea floor based on real data drawn from a shallow water site is presented. Two independent in version schemes are used to deduce these properties. The first is matched-f ield processing of the pressure field on a vertical line array due to a pro jected source. The second approach is the inversion of ambient noise on a v ertical array. Matched-field processing has shown to be successful in the i nversion of high quality field data. Here, we show that it is also feasible with a more practical and less expensive data collection scheme. It will a lso be shown that low frequency inversion is more robust to variation rand fluctuation in the propagating medium, whereas high frequencies are more se nsitive to mismatches in a varying medium. A comparison is made of the esti mates obtained from the two techniques and also with available historical d ata of the trial site.