Abstract
It is shown that a transient Green's function can be obtained through correlations of concurrent recordings of a diffuse acoustic ambient noise field at two locations. A discussion of the history, motivation, and mathematical background of this method, “noise interferometry”, is presented. The idea is demonstrated through modeling and tested using field measurements collected in December 2012 near the Florida Keys. The field experiment made use of concurrent ambient noise recordings at three locations using moored receivers placed near the bottom. The focus here is on a receiver pair separated horizontally by approximately 5 km, with the goal of showing that the estimated Green's function is suitable for tomographic inversion. In agreement with expectations based on theory, it is shown that by summing many realizations of the correlation function an approximation to the Green’s function can be retrieved. The estimated Green's function is favorably compared with simulations performed with the MMPE acoustic model.