An overview of research in underwater acoustics

Abstract

Underwater acoustics (UW) studies underwater sound generation, propagation, and detection over scales ranging from millimeters to megameters, and often has overlapping interests with AB, AO, and SP. This talk will sample several topics of interest to the UW technical committee, including recent studies in propagation, inversion, and scattering, using both active and passive techniques. A long-term trend has been the discovery of how both deterministic and random components of the underwater acoustic field can be used to invert for surface, water column, sediment, and biological properties, which in turn provides parametrizations for improved “forward” modeling.