Performance of single empirical orthogonal function regression method in global sound speed profile inversion and sound field prediction

Abstract

The sound speed profile (SSP) reflects the change in sound speed from the surface to the bottom of the seawater, which will have an important influence on underwater acoustic detection and communication. Depending on the inversion of sea surface data sets measured by satellite to obtain near-real-time and high-precision SSPs has become a research hotspot. In this paper, based on the Argo data and the sea surface data sets, we use the single empirical orthogonal function regression (sEOF-r) method to inverse the global SSPs and evaluate the performance of this method. There are also differences in the performance of inversed results at different sites and in different months at the global scale of the ocean. The eddy kinetic energy (EKE) affects the accuracy of inversion, we propose to add the EKE into the inversion formula at the same time to further optimize the inversed results and improve the accuracy, the global average inversion error after optimization reduces by 20%. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the optimized method from the perspective of sound field prediction. In most cases, the correlation coefficient of the transmission loss (TL) calculated through the inversion SSP and Argo-SSP exceeds 0.7 and the error is controlled below 6 dB, which will have important implications for the actual sound field prediction and hydroacoustic communication.