A spectral approach to geoacoustic inversion from sparse impulsive sources

A common approach to geoacoustic inversion is to match the temporal structure displayed by modeled and measured acoustic data produced at a small number of frequencies by range sampling source emissions over a broad interval between a source and a receiver. An alternative approach is to match spectral structure in modeled and measured acoustic data for a small number of source-receiver separations from a fine frequency sample over a broad bandwidth. The latter approach is demonstrated with Shallow Water '06 experiment data in which the acoustic sources were imploding light bulbs. Geoacoustic parameter values obtained by this approach are compared to values obtained from previous inversions, and the limits of validity of the approach are discussed.