Book excerpt: Recent advances in the power of inversion methods, the accuracy of acoustic field prediction codes, and the speed of digital computers have made the full field inversion of ocean and seismic parameters on a large scale a practical possibility. These methods exploit amplitude and phase information detected on hydrophone/geophone arrays, thereby extending traditional inversion schemes based on time of flight measurements. Full field inversion methods provide environmental information by minimising the mismatch between measured and predicted acoustic fields through a global search of possible environmental parameters. Full Field Inversion Methods in Ocean and Seismo-Acoustics is the formal record of a conference held in Italy in June 1994, sponsored by NATO SACLANT Undersea Research Centre. It includes papers by NATO specialists and others. Topics covered include: · speed and accuracy of acoustic field prediction codes · signal processing strategies · global inversion algorithms · search spaces of environmental parameters · environmental stochastic limitations · special purpose computer architectures · measurement geometries · source and receiving sensor technologies.