Inversion of Seawater Physical Properties Based on Allied Elastic Impedance

Abstract

Inversion of seawater physical parameters (temperature, salinity and density) from seismic data is an important part of Seismic Oceanography, which was raised recent years to study physical oceanography. However present methods have problems that inversion accuracy is not high or inverted parameters are incomprehensive. To overcome these problems, this paper derives Allied Elastic Impedance (AEI), from which we can extract acoustic velocity and density of seawater directly. Furthermore this paper proposes a method to fit temperature and salinity with acoustic velocity and density respectively, breaking through the limitation that temperature and salinity can only be extracted from acoustic velocity. After applying it to model and real data, we find that this method not only solves the problem that ocean density is hard to extract, but also increases accuracy of other parameters, with the temperature and salinity resolution of 0.06°C and 0.02 psu respectively. All results show that AEI is promising in inversion of seawater physical parameters.