Effect of shallow water internal waves on ocean acoustic striation patterns

Abstract

Contour plots of underwater acoustic intensity, mapped in range and frequency, often exhibit striations. It has been claimed that a scalar parameter ‘beta’, defined in terms of the slope of the striations, is invariant to the details of the acoustic waveguide. In shallow water, the canonical value is β=1. In the present paper, the waveguide invariant is modelled as a distribution rather than a scalar. The effects of shallow water internal waves on the distribution are studied by numerical simulation. Realizations of time-evolving shallow water internal wave fields are synthesized and acoustic propagation simulated using the parabolic equation method. The waveguide invariant distribution is tracked as the internal wave field evolves in time. Both random background internal waves and more event-like solitary internal waves are considered.