Effect of tidal internal wave fields on shallow water acoustic propagation

Abstract

Internal waves are one of the most pronounced oceanic phenomenons to the oceanographer. During past decades much effort has been made to investigate the effect of internal waves on shallow water acoustic propagation. Even though many field observations, such as SWARM ’95, have provided fruitful information about the relation between internal waves and acoustic propagation, it is necessary to conduct more numerical simulations due to their extensive feasibility. In this study, the shallow water internal wave environment is constructed by using a non‐hydrostatic ocean model, the open boundary forcing is set by considering single or several internal wave modes at the M2 tidal frequency. In order to show the mode coupling caused by the internal wave field more clearly, the acoustic starting field with different single normal modes is adopted. The acoustic simulation can be used to check whether a specific combination of internal wave modes is related to the mode coupling, and which mode pair will be affected. The combination of internal wave modes can be separated into several groups. Even though the internal wave fields are different among every case in each group, the acoustic field structure and the mode coupling are similar. Different acoustic normal mode coupling occurs due to the different combinations of internal wave mode forcing. When the parameters of internal wave mode are modified gently, the acoustic mode coupling becomes quite different. It is interesting and important to investigate the sensitivity of acoustic fields to the variability of the internal mode combination.