Real-time acoustic modeling in the 2021 New England Shelf Break Acoustics experiment and beyond

Abstract

Real-time acoustic modeling in a shipboard context emphasizes the element of computation time in pursuit of in situ comparison between observed ocean data and model output. The importance of computation time highlights two competing factors in efforts to produce real-time acoustic predictions: the quantity of models to run and model accuracy. During the 2021 New England Shelf Break Acoustics (NESBA) experiment, a four-dimensional (4D) model of acoustic signals in the experiment network comprised of multiple stationary sound sources and receivers was produced using shipboard high-performance computing (HPC) resources. This effort involved hundreds of acoustic model runs across four separate source and receiver pairings and allowed for in-situ model adjustments, ultimately producing favorable comparisons between data and models in a matter of days. This presentation will examine the HPC approaches taken during the NESBA science cruise and address the planned improvements to the system for future scientific field experiments. [This work is supported by the Office of Naval Research.]