Range dependence of the vertical structure of the sound field in the ocean

Abstract

In the ocean without fluctuations, the sound field is calculated by the method of geometrical acoustics with allowance for purely water-path rays in a sound channel of canonical shape with a thickness of 4 km for distances of 500 and 2000 km. The sound field is determined as a sum of individual rays arriving at a given point with their own amplitudes and phases. It is shown that the vertical structure of the sound field consists of a number of caustics separated by regions with a quasi-random distribution of the field whose amplitude is much smaller than that in the caustics. At a fixed distance, the number of caustics is equal to the difference between the numbers of the ray turning points at the boundaries of the departure angle range. As the distance from the source increases, the number of caustics increases proportionally to distance.