Simulations of acoustic tomography array performance with untracked or drifting sources and receivers

Ocean tomography as originally proposed required all sources and recievers to be tautly moored and acoustically tracked to separate travel time perturbations due to mooring motion from those due to ocean features. It is possible to process the tomographic travel times to estimate both ocean sound speed perturbations and mooring offsets, effecting a separation without external tracking. A side effect of this processing is a check on the ray identification, since the varying instrument positions can be used as a synthetic array for estimating ray angle. Simulations and examples with actual data were used to contrast mapping performance with and without mooring tracking for a variety of ray data sets. In general, the ocean maps degrade when the tracking data are withheld. However, when many high‐precision ray travel time measurements are available, the degradation is small; in these cases it would be possible to deploy free‐drifting instruments as part of a monitoring experiment.