Ocean Current Inference Using Towed Cable Hydrodynamics

We consider the problem of estimating in real time the profile of ocean currents on towed arrays from positioning and tension measurements. This ill-posed inverse problem is addressed in the context of Bayesian statistics using maximum a posteriori estimation. Drawing the analogies to the generalized Tikhonov formulation, we implement an efficient algorithm that optimizes regularization and, subsequently, derive confidence intervals on the estimated currents. We then address the problem of reconstructing the profile of the angle of attack on the basis of the estimated ocean velocities and propose a stochastic simulation algorithm to evaluate it. To demonstrate the performance of our methods, some results from simulated experiments are presented.