Estimates of the prevalence of anomalous signal losses in the Yellow Sea derived from acoustic and oceanographic computer model simulations

Abstract

The results from collocated oceanographic and acoustic simulations in a region of the Yellow Sea near the Shandong peninsula have been presented [Chin-Bing et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 2577 (2000)]. In that work, the tidal flow near the peninsula was used to initialize a 2.5-dimensional ocean model [K. G. Lamb, J. Geophys. Res. 99, 843–864 (1994)] that subsequently generated internal solitary waves (solitons). The validity of these soliton simulations was established by matching satellite imagery taken over the region. Acoustic propagation simulations through this soliton field produced results similar to the anomalous signal loss measured by Zhou, Zhang, and Rogers [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 2042–2054 (1991)]. Analysis of the acoustic interactions with the solitons also confirmed the hypothesis that the loss mechanism involved acoustic mode coupling. Recently we have attempted to estimate the prevalence of these anomalous signal losses in this region. These estimates were made from simulating acoustic effects over an 80 hour space-time evolution of soliton packets. Examples will be presented that suggest the conditions necessary for anomalous signal loss may be more prevalent than previously thought. [Work supported by ONR/NRL and by a High Performance Computing DoD grant.]