Geoacoustic inversion for a New England mud patch sediment using the silt-suspension theory of marine mud
This article provides an application of the silt-suspension theory to a Bayesian-inference inversion for the geo-acoustic parameters in marine mud. The theory, with consequences that have been developed recently, postulates a suspension of water and clay mineral card-houses that supports moderately dilute concentrations of silt particles. The approach is an example of a physically based model inversion, in which parameters representing physical mud-layer properties are obtained by inversion and used to produce estimates of geoacoustic properties, including their frequency dependence. The acoustic data are from a combustive source signal propagated along a track, located over several meters of fine-grained mud in the New England Mud Patch, to a single hydrophone on a receiver array during the 2017 Seabed Characterization Experiment. Data extracted from a nearby piston core inform the physical modeling, with selections of inversion parameters guided by both sensitivity analyses and bounds from archival and core measurements. Results show the feasibility of this inversion approach. The estimates of mud density and sound speed are close to values obtained independently. The frequency dependence of attenuation is estimated over the full low-frequency source band and has an approximate power exponent of 1.72.
Citation Information
Publication Year | 2020 |
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Title | Geoacoustic inversion for a New England mud patch sediment using the silt-suspension theory of marine mud |
DOI | 10.1109/JOE.2019.2934604 |
Authors | Elisabeth M. Brown, Ying-Tsong Lin, Jason Chaytor, William L. Siegmann |
Publication Type | Article |
Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
Series Title | IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering |
Index ID | 70240961 |
Record Source | USGS Publications Warehouse |
USGS Organization | Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center |