The 1984 bottom‐mounted Gulf Stream tomographic experiment

In this paper, data from a Gulf Stream tomographic experiment carried out in October 1984 are analyzed. The experiment used acoustic sources and receivers bottom mounted beneath the stream to measure Gulf Stream dynamics. However, due to an unfortunate electronic malfunction of the source, only 2 days of acoustically measured travel time data are available. Nevertheless, some new and positive results are obtained. Bottom reflected acoustic rays having up to two bottom bounces are unambiguously identified by solving the direct problem of tracing rays both in a reference climatological profile and in actual range‐dependent sound‐speed sections from a hydrographic survey carried out during the experiment. It is also shown that these rays do not appear to be affected by important nonlinearities so that they can be used to provide consistent results in inverse solutions.