AREA: Adaptive Rapid Environmental Assessment

Abstract

AREA: Adaptive Rapid Environmental Assessment is a new operational paradigm for minimizing the sonar performance uncertainty in shallow water. The coastal environment is characterized by variability on small spatial scales and short temporal scales, which obstruct the formation of a robust and reliable tactical picture. Thus, a Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA) capability has long been recognized as a tactical need, but its implementation is being constrained by limited in-situ measurement resources. Ocean modeling and data assimilation can produce 4-D field estimates together with their associated uncertainty. However, the resolution is inadequate for direct use in acoustic environment prediction. On the other hand the forecasts can be used to identify features such as fronts and eddies which are critical to the acoustic sonar performance uncertainty and which should therefore be targeted by the REA resources. AREA uses environmental acoustic and sonar models to translate the oceanographic and geophysical parameter uncertainty estimates into PDFs for the appropriate sonar performance metric. These are then used to objectively design survey patterns that target regions and parameters that produce the best possible sonar performance prediction within the actual operational constraints.