Shallow-water waveguide acoustic analysis in a fluctuating environment

J Acoust Soc Am. 2022 Sep;152(3):1252. doi: 10.1121/10.0013831.

Abstract

The Acoustic Laboratory for Marine Applications (ALMA) is a deployable and autonomous acoustic system, designed by DGA Naval Systems, to address problems in underwater acoustics, such as sound propagation in fluctuating environments. In this article, data from the ALMA-2016 at-sea campaign are used to analyze the ocean fluctuation's influence on sound propagation in a shallow-water waveguide. The experiment took place on the continental shelf of the island of Corsica in November 2016. A source and a receiver array were 9.3 km apart in a nearly constant water depth of 100 m. The source emitted a variety of signals from which the chirp (1-13 kHz) is used to extract the waveguide eigenrays. To do so, a time-domain beamforming is performed on the match-filtered received signals with an automatic detection of local maxima in the time of arrival/direction of arrival (TOA/DOA) domain. A 2 min acquisition period of more than 13 h duration shows significant fluctuations in eigenray TOAs/DOAs. Qualitative comparisons with synthetic signals obtained from simulations in two and three dimensions permit reproduction of the observed eigenray fluctuations without including range dependence of the sound-speed profile.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics*
  • Motion
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Water

Substances

  • Water