Short range travel time geoacoustic inversion with vertical line array

This paper presents travel time geoacoustic inversion of broadband data collected on a vertical line array at short range of 230 m during the Shallow Water 2006 experiments. A ray-tracing method combined with a hybrid optimization algorithm that utilizes differential evolution and downhill simplex was used for the inversion of sediment properties. The ocean sound speed profile and geometric parameters were inverted prior to the sea bottom properties to account for the temporally variable ocean environment. The sediment sound speed and thickness estimates are consistent with in situ measurements and matched-field inversion results of longer-range data from the experiment.