Broadband source localization in shallow water in the presence of internal waves

Abstract

Source localization is a challenging problem in a time-varying random shallow-water environment in the presence of internal waves. The short correlation time of the acoustic field (a couple of minutes) makes it difficult to adjust the replica field in response to the environmental changes. Also, mode couplings induced by the internal waves are random and not predictable. In this paper, the effect of mode coupling on source localization in the presence of Garrett–Munk and solitary internal waves is investigated. It is found that mode coupling affects practically all modes in shallow water. Random-mode coupling reduces the matched-field correlation. To improve source localization, a broadband matched-beam processing algorithm is proposed to suppress the noncoherent coupled-mode contributions. It is shown that this technique significantly improves the localization performance over conventional matched-field processing.