The Inversion of Ocean Waveguide Parameters Using a Nonlinear Least Squares Approach

An optimization approach is used to estimate waveguide parameters for selected test cases of the Geoacoustic Benchmark Inversion Workshop held in Vancouver, June 1997. The approach uses multiple acoustic data samples to decouple the original N–dimensional problem into several smaller-dimensional problems. A nonlinear least squares approach is used to estimate parameters in each subset. The estimation of parameters in each subset proceeds until convergence is reached. Predicted values are in good agreement with the true values, which suggests that the decoupling of waveguide parameters allows a nonlinear least squares approach to be an effective tool in the inversion of ocean waveguide parameters.