Numerical Experiments of Ocean Acoustic Tomography in the East Sea of Korea

Numerical experiments of OAT (Ocean Acoustic Tomography) are carried out in the East Sea of Korea where the canonical ocean has been perturbed by a mesoscale warm eddy and a thermal front. In order to estimate the horizontal and vertical structure of water temperature of the perturbed ocean, the experimental area is divided into 16 cells with 8 pairs of sources and receivers for a horizontal slice and the water column is divided into 8 layers for a vertical slice. The inversely estimated temperature field by using SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) method reveals the eddy and frontal structure clearly. The rms errors of the two horizontal slices are less than $0.4^{\circ}C$ and $1.7^{\circ}C$ at 400 m and 200 m depths, respectively, while the error in the vertical slice is less than $1.0^{\circ}C.$ For better estimation of temperature by OAT method, particularly for the East Sea, a range-dependent ray model should be used to solve the forward problem. At the same time, improvement in computing the refracted ray path between vertical layers is required to obtain more accurate travel time information. The results of the present experiment give rise to a possibility of application of OAT in remote sensing of the ocean thermal structure.