title: Joint inversion for transponder localization and sound-speed profile temporal variation in high-precision acoustic surveys.
abstract: This letter develops a Bayesian inversion for localizing underwater acoustic transponders using a surface ship which compensates for sound-speed profile (SSP) temporal variation during the survey. The method is based on dividing observed acoustic travel-time data into time segments and including depth-independent SSP variations for each segment as additional unknown parameters to approximate the SSP temporal variation. SSP variations are estimated jointly with transponder locations, rather than calculated separately as in existing two-step inversions. Simulation and sea-trial results show this localization/SSP joint inversion performs better than two-step inversion in terms of localization accuracy, agreement with measured SSP variations, and computational efficiency.
authors.affiliation: College of Underwater Acoustic Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China lizhao0517@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Zhao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 3V6, Canada sdosso@uvic.ca.
authors.forename: Stan E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Dosso
authors.affiliation: Science and Technology on Underwater Acoustic Laboratory, Harbin 150001, China sundajun0501@sina.cn.
authors.forename: Dajun
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sun