The estimation of geoacoustic properties from broadband acoustic data, focusing on instantaneous frequency techniques

The compressional wave velocity and attenuation of marine sediments are fundamental to marine science. In order to obtain reliable estimates of these parameters it is necessary to examine in situ acoustic data, which is generally broadband. A variety of techniques for estimating the compressional wave velocity and attenuation from broadband acoustic data are reviewed. The application of Instantaneous Frequency (IF) techniques to data collected from a normal-incidence chirp profiler is examined. For the datasets examined the best estimates of IF are obtained by dividing the chirp profile into a series of sections, estimating the IF of each trace in the section using the first moments of the Wigner Ville distribution, and stacking the resulting IF to obtain a composite IF for the section. As the datasets examined cover both gassy and saturated sediments, this is likely to be the optimum technique for chirp datsets collected from all sediment environments.