Direct temperature and salinity acoustic full waveform inversion

Recent work has shown that Full Waveform Inversion could be suitable to extract physical properties such as sound speed (c), density (ρ), temperature (T), and salinity (S) from the weak impedance contrasts associated with the ocean's thermohaline fine structure.The seismic inversion approaches proposed so far are based on the iterative inversion of c from multichannel seismic data, while the rest of parameters (T,S, and ρ) are determined in a second step using two equations of state and a local T‐S empirical relationship. In this work, we present an alternative to this approach. Using 1‐D synthetic seismic data, we demonstrate that the direct full waveform inversion of T and S using adjoint methods is feasible without the use of any local T‐S relationship and that the models of physical properties obtained with this approach are far more accurate than those inferred from c. Key Points T and S can be inverted simultaneously from ocean acoustic data using FWI Local T‐S empirical relationships are not required for the inversion Our T and S results have a potential density error of 0.01 kg/m3