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Long-range sound fields in a shallow-water waveguide can be expressed as a summation of several dispersive propagating modes. Modal arrival times as a function of frequency, extracted via warping time-frequency analysis, have been used by many researchers to estimate sound speeds and densities for layered models of the seabed sediments. This paper explores joint inversion of modal amplitude spectra together with arrival times to also estimate sediment-layer attenuations. To consider the common case in underwater-acoustic applications where the source amplitude spectrum is unknown, we include this spectrum as unknown parameters in the inversion, formulated implicitly within the likelihood function. Trans-dimensional Bayesian inversion is applied to estimate marginal probability profiles of the geoacoustic properties, providing quantitative uncertainties. The data considered here were collected on the New England Mud Patch during the 2017 Seabed Characterization Experiment. Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.
Jiang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.