Multi-step geoacoustic inversion with a towed line array

Geoacoustic inversion is important for acoustic field predictions and matched field localizations in shallow water.Combing the Matched-field inversion(MFI) and the Reflectionloss inversion,a multi-step Bayesian inversion for geoacoustic parameters was presented.This method applied the posterior probability density(PPD) or inversion results from one inversion as prior information for subsequent inversion.First,the sensitive parameters were determined by the MFI.Second,the insensitive parameters were determined by the Reflection-loss inversion based on the PPD and inversion results from the MFI.The PPD results indicated that the multi-step inversion method was performed better than direct matched-field inversion,and the inversion results of some parameters were improved significantly.To demonstrate the advantages of the multi-step inversion method on the sound field prediction,the statistical properties of transmission loss based on the posterior probability were introduced.The transmission loss distribution showed that the predicted acoustic fields based on the multi-step inversion method had smaller errors.