Ocean acoustic tomography in the Beaufort Gyre

Abstract

An ocean acoustic tomography array with a radius of 150 km was installed in the central Beaufort Gyre during 2016–2017 for the Canada Basin Acoustic Propagation Experiment (CANAPE). Five transceivers were deployed in a pentagon shape with a sixth transceiver at the center and a long vertical receiving array northwest of the central mooring. At least 12 refracted-surface-reflected (RSR) ray arrivals with lower turning points at depths between 500 and 3500 m were resolved in the acoustic receptions at all receivers. Travel-time anomalies were computed relative to a range-dependent sound-speed reference made by objectively interpolating annual-average sound-speed profiles constructed from the temperature data at each mooring. The travel time anomalies were inverted to estimate the 3-D sound-speed anomaly, including corrections to the positions of sources and receivers consistent with the uncertainty from long-baseline acoustic navigation systems at each mooring. Although the deep water in the Canada Basin is nearly homogeneous in temperature and salinity and highly stable (slowly warming in response to geothermal heating), it proved necessary to allow for a sound-speed change in the deep ocean to obtain consistent inversions, suggesting that the sound-speed equation at high pressure and low temperature is in error by about 0.1–0.2 ms−1.