"Ocean Acoustic Tomography Applied to the Estimation of
Internal Tides in the Continental Platform"
PhD thesis by Orlando C. Rodríguez
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Abstract: this thesis discusses the application of the methods
of Ocean Acoustic Tomography to monitorize and invert the variations of
internal tides in coastal environments. The material of this thesis
starts with the detailed theoretical description of the propagation of
internal tides, in the linear and non-linear cases. This discussion
allows one to introduce the concept of Hydrostatic Normal Modes (HNMs).
It is shown, in particular, that the HNMs constitute a complete
orthogonal basis to represent the fields of pressure, current,
temperature, sound speed and salinity. Furthermore, ray-tracing
simulations are used to predict the effects of variations on waveguide
geometry, and sound speed, on the temporal arrivals of the acoustic
signal. The simulations allow one to develop a robust strategy of
tomographic inversion, which is first tested with simulated data, and
then on real acoustic data from the INTIMATE'96 experiment. Finally, it
is shown that the methods of Ocean Acoustic Tomography can be
efficiently applied to monitorize and invert the propagation of the
internal tide, allowing one to achieve a high degree of tomographic
precision.