Matched-field inversion in the East China Sea with Tabu Search

Tabu is a global optimization approach which generates and exploits lists of already visited points to efficiently traverse search spaces. A Tabu-based technique has been recently developed for source localization and geoacoustic inversion in ocean environments; the method has been tested on synthetic and real data and is further validated in this work through a successful application to broadband data from the 2001 ASIAEX experiment both for source localization and geoacoustic inversion. The success of the method is found to be intimately tied to the exploitation of the sensitivity of the measured acoustic field to the unknown parameters. Eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix of the objective function gradient determines how the search should be diversified for fast identification of the global maximum.