Effects of offshore mesoscale eddies and fronts on inshore shallow water acoustic propagation

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Shallow water shelf areas inside of western boundary currents have two distinctly different ocean acoustic environments determined by the type of front that separates deep offshore from shallow inshore. Prograde fronts allow for the ducting of offshore internal waves up onto the shelf as the main source the sound speed fluctuations over the internal wave band. Retrograde fronts block the propagation of offshore internal waves setting up stability conditions that allow for propagation of locally generated, large amplitude non‐linear solitary waves as the major source of sound speed variability. Here, acoustic propagation is examined for both environments with data from two similar fixed system propagation experiments, one for the prograde environment off the coast of south Florida near the site off the Acoustic Observatory, and the second for the retrograde front environment of the Mid‐Atlantic Bight the SWO6 site. Offshore mesoscale features of fronts and eddies are shown to determine mean sound speed profiles and the energy of the internal wave fields. In turn, intensity fluctuations and temporal coherencies of broadband acoustic signals over several octaves are observed to vary with variations of the sound speed. For some locations, observations of mesoscale features alone can predict sonar performance.