Geoacoustic inversion of short range source data using a plane wave reflection coefficient approach

Acoustic time series data were collected in a shallow, hard bottom lake environment located in central Texas using both short range (2 m) implosive data, obtained with the source and a single hydrophone located near mid-depth in the waveguide, along with longer range implosive and explosive data from a near surface source to a bottom mounted hydrophone. Matched field inversions using simulated annealing were performed with a ray trace plus complex plane wave reflection coefficient forward propagation model that was validated in previous work. Isolating bottom interacting paths to perform the inversions is shown to be essential to reduce parameter uncertainties in the hard bottom environment and enables a systematic approach to the inversions which establishes the number of layers needed to represent the lake environment. Measured transmission loss data from a towed source were compared through a RMS error analysis to modeled transmission loss, constructed with the parameters from inversions of data from several source types, to further establish the validity of the inversion approach for this environment. Geoacoustic parameters obtained by inversions of short range, low frequency impulsive data are used to predict transmission loss at longer ranges and higher frequencies. The range dependence of the global minimum is discussed.