Full wave-field reflection coefficient inversion

This paper develops a Bayesian inversion for recovering multilayer geoacoustic (velocity, density, attenuation) profiles from a full wave-field (spherical-wave) seabed reflection response. The reflection data originate from acoustic time series windowed for a single bottom interaction, which are processed to yield reflection coefficient data as a function of frequency and angle. Replica data for inversion are computed using a wave number-integration model to calculate the full complex acoustic pressure field, which is processed to produce a commensurate seabed response function. To address the high computational cost of calculating short range acoustic fields, the inversion algorithms are parallelized and frequency averaging is replaced by range averaging in the forward model. The posterior probability density is interpreted in terms of optimal parameter estimates, marginal distributions, and credibility intervals. Inversion results for the full wave-field seabed response are compared to those obtained using plane-wave reflection coefficients. A realistic synthetic study indicates that the plane-wave assumption can fail, producing erroneous results with misleading uncertainty bounds, whereas excellent results are obtained with the full-wave reflection inversion.