Environmental measurements collected during TREX13 to support acoustic modeling

Abstract

The major goal of TREX13 (Target and Reverberation EXperiment 2013) was to quantitatively investigate reverberation with sufficient environmental measurements to support full modeling of reverberation data. The collection of environmental data to support reverberation modeling is usually limited by the large ranges (10s of km) involved, the temporal and spatial variability of the environment and the time variation of towed source/receiver locations within this environment. In order to overcome these difficulties, TREX13 was carried out in a 20 m deep shelf environment using horizontal line arrays mounted on the seafloor. The water depth and well controlled array geometry allowed environmental characterization to be focused on the main beam of the array, i.e., along a track roughly 5 km long and 500 m wide. This talk presents an overview of the efforts made to characterize the sea surface, water column, seafloor, and subbottom along this track to support the modeling of acoustic data collected over the course of the experiment. [Work supported by ONR Ocean Acoustics.]