History of acoustical oceanography

Abstract

This lecture traces the history of acoustical oceanography from its beginnings during WWII (although it was not called Acoustical Oceanography at the time) to the present. We describe how during the Cold War the U.S. and Soviet Navy’s efforts to improve the performance of their torpedoes and sonars revealed unknown ocean features and processes. We discuss the prominent role of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research in bringing underwater acoustics and oceanography together, and fostering the science upon which Acoustical Oceanography is based. We show how the two fields eventually fused into a new discipline called Acoustical Oceanography, and how that combination has resulted in today’s acoustic methods for observing the ocean on micro, regional, and global scales.