A tomography experiment using ships as sources of opportunity

An experiment was performed in the Santa Barbara Channel using four vertical acoustic receive arrays placed between the sea lanes of in- and outgoing shipping traffic. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether these sources of opportunity can be utilized for tomographic inversion of water column properties. The environment was continuously monitored throughout the duration of the experiment. Ship tracks were obtained from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Processing was developed to extract relative time delays between the arrays from the ships’ random radiation fields. This information, together with AIS constraints were used for inversion. Initial results are presented that also include an error analysis of the inversion.