Passive travel time tomography using ships as acoustic sources of opportunity

Abstract

Active ocean acoustic tomography transmits known source signals and often includes precise source and receiver positioning. Passive estimation of channel Greens functions has been widely demonstrated using both diffuse and concentrated noise sources, including the estimation of ocean sound speeds and currents. The uncertainty of surface ship positions determined by the Automatic Identification System (AIS) translates to travel time variability that is larger than expected from ocean structure at ranges of a few kilometers, but listening to the same source from spatially-distributed receivers adds more data while maintaining the same source position unknowns and may allow useful estimates of bottom depths from bottom-interacting rays and perhaps ocean structure. A fall 2016 experiment will test these ideas in the Santa Barbara Basin using 4 vertical line receiver arrays recording ship-radiated sound for 10 days. Estimates of the expected performance of the estimates of bottom depth and ocean sound speed have been a part of the design process. A general circulation model will be used to increase the efficiency of information use by parameterizing the four-dimensional ocean sound speed structure in terms of initial conditions, boundary conditions, and surface forcing. We present the design process and some proof-of-concept calculations from experimental observations.