Abstract. Temperature fields in marine sediments are studied for various purposes. Often, the target of research is the steady state heat flow as a (possible) source of energy but there are also studies attempting to reconstruct bottom water temperature variations to understand more about climate history. The bottom water temperature propagates into the sediment to different depths, depending on the amplitude and period of the deviation. The steady state heat flow can only be determined when the bottom water temperature is constant while the bottom water temperature history can only be reconstructed when the deviation has an amplitude large enough or the measurements are taken in great depths. In this work, the aim is to reconstruct recent bottom water temperature history such as the last two years. To this end, measurements to depths of up to 6 m shall be adequate and amplitudes smaller than 1 K should be reconstructable. First, a commonly used forward model is introduced and analyzed: knowing the bottom water temperature deviation in the last years and the thermal properties of the sediments, the forward model gives the sediment temperature field. Next, an inversion operator and two common inversion schemes are introduced. The analysis of the inversion operator and both algorithms is kept short, but sources for further reading are given. The algorithms are then tested for artificial data with different noise levels and for two example data sets, one from the German North Sea and one from the Davis Strait. Both algorithms show good and stable results for artificial data. The achieved results for measured data have low variances and match to the observed oceanographic settings. Lastly, the desired and obtained accuracy are discussed. For artificial data, the presented method yields satisfying results. However, for measured data the interpretation of the results is more difficult as the exact form of the bottom water deviation is not known. Nevertheless, the presented inversion method seems rather promising due to its accuracy and stability for artificial data. Continuing to work on the development of more sophisticated models for the bottom water temperature, we hope to cover more different oceanographic settings in the future.
Reconstructing bottom water temperatures from measurements of temperature and thermal diffusivity in marine sediments
