Correlating shipping noise on multiple beams

Abstract

There has been much interest in using transiting surface ships as sources of opportunity for tomography and geo acoustic inversion. In tomography, it would be valuable to increase the ranges at which ship signatures can be processed by measuring times of arrival at the output of beamforming processes, which provide spatial processing gain. This additional gain may enable fainter multipath arrivals to be identified and exploited as additional paths to sample the ocean water column. This seems readily achievable when cross-correlating multiple vertical beams formed on a single vertical line array for example. However, cross-correlating beams from multiple arrays, vertical or horizontal, raises questions. In both cases, different beams may have different Doppler, which is manageable with a correlation process that includes Doppler compensation. But obeserving a ship from different vantage points may be problematic, if the ship signature is due to horizontally displaced noise sources distributed around the ship. We will present results of processing surface ships observed on single and multiple arrays and assess the use of such processing in ambient noise tomography.