An adjoint method for tsunami waveform inversion is proposed, as an alternative to the technique based on Green's functions of the linear long wave model. The method has the advantage of being able to use the nonlinear shallow water equations, or other appropriate equation sets, and to optimize an initial state given as a linear or nonlinear function of any set of free parameters. This last facility is used to perform explicit optimization of the focal fault parameters, characterizing the initial sea surface displacement of tsunamigenic earthquakes. The proposed methodology is validated with experiments using synthetic data, showing the possibility of recovering all relevant details of a tsunami source from tide gauge observations, providing that the adjoint method is constrained in an appropriate manner. It is found, as in other methods, that the inversion skill of tsunami sources increases with the azimuthal and temporal coverage of assimilated tide gauge stations; furthermore, it is shown that the eigenvalue analysis of the Hessian matrix of the cost function provides a consistent and useful methodology to choose the subset of independent parameters that can be inverted with a given dataset of observations and to evaluate the error of the inversion process. The method is also applied to real tide gauge series, from the tsunami of the February 28, 1969, Gorringe Bank earthquake, suggesting some reasonable changes to the assumed focal parameters of that event. It is suggested that the method proposed may be able to deal with transient tsunami sources such as those generated by submarine landslides. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union