Reverberation modeling workshops.

Abstract

To evaluate progress made in basic and applied underwater acoustic reverberation modeling and to make recommendations for transitions to operational systems, a series of two reverberation modeling workshops (RMWs) was held (the last in May 2008). A basic goal of the RMWs was to provide well-defined problems and consensus solutions to support verification and validation for new models, upgrades to Navy Standard models, and geoacoustic inversion techniques based on reverberation data. The basic problem in designing the workshop was that even the simplest reverberation problems of interest to the Navy do not have closed form solutions and are still (essentially) beyond our computational capabilities to solve using standard “exact” numerical techniques. All current, practical underwater reverberation models replace the physical problem by employing scattering and loss functions or tables. We discuss the development of a sequence of well-defined problems (physics-based), with the equivalent loss/scattering input, which increases in complexity. We also discuss the lessons learned in this process and point out some of the unexpected results from the workshops, and make recommendations for future benchmarking workshops. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]