In seismic oceanography, processed images highlight small temperature changes, but inversion is needed to obtain absolute temperatures. Local search‐based full waveform inversion has a lower computational cost than global search but requires accurate starting models. Unfortunately, most marine seismic data have little associated hydrographic data and the band‐limited nature of seismic data makes extracting the long wavelength sound speed trend directly from seismic data inherently challenging. Laplace and Laplace‐Fourier domain inversion (LDI) can use rudimentary starting models without prior information about the medium. Data are transformed to the Laplace domain, and a smooth sound speed model is extracted by examining the zero and low frequency components of the damped wavefield. We applied LDI to five synthetic data sets based on oceanographic features and recovered smoothed versions of our synthetic models, showing the viability of LDI for creating starting models suitable for more detailed inversions.