Resonance interaction of sound waves with a stratified seabed

Abstract

A novel approach to analyze the reflection and transmission of sound waves from a penetrable and layered fleet interface between two media is described. This approach generalizes the first‐order prediction of the resonance scattering theory (RST), which was developed earlier for stacks of arbitrarily many elastic plates separating dissimilar fluid media [Jackins and Gaunaurd, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1762–1776 (1986)]. The generalization consists of two portions. The first one makes the lower fluid medium become an elastic half‐space, which makes the model useful to predict reflections from a stratified ocean bottom. This portion was briefly analyzed earlier [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 80, S116 (1986)]. The second portion, now married to the first, consists in a second‐order approximation for the parameters involved in the description of the bottom reflection/transmission coefficients, which retains second‐order terms containing second derivatives of the pertinent parameters. This is an application to fl...