On the consideration of motion effects in underwater geoacoustic inversion

Abstract

The estimation of an impulse response (IR) of a propagation channel is necessary for a large number of underwater acoustic applications: underwater communication, sonar detection and localization, marine mammal monitoring, etc. Basically, it informs us about the distortions of a transmitted signal in one underwater channel. This operation is usually subject to additional distortions due to the motion of the transmitter‐channel‐receiver configuration. This paper points on the effects of the motion while estimating the IR for shallow water environments in the very low frequencies bandwidth with matching filtering between the transmitted and the received signals. We propose a methodology to compare between the IR estimation in motionless and motion contexts, respectively. Using this methodology an objective criterion for motion effect analysis is proposed in order to measure the distortions due to the motion phenomena. The proposed methodology is applied to real data sets issued from PASSTIME campaign (SHOM, Bay of Biscaie, 2005) proving also its interest for motion effect analysis.