Scattering off rough boundaries in ray and normal mode theory with applications to ocean acoustic tomography and shallow water acoustics

Abstract

Two quantities which can be important, both in acoustic tomography and in shallow water acoustics, are the spread and wander in time of received acoustic pulses due to boundary scattering. These effects limit the pulse travel time resolution one may achieve and then ultimately the resolution of features in the water column (tomography) or ocean bottom (shallow water acoustics). In order to calculate these effects, a breakup of the scattering into adiabatic (leading to pulse wander) and coupled (leading to pulse spreading) ray and mode components was made, and moments of the deterministic propagation results were generated. Applications of this work to coherent array processing and further extensions of this work will be discussed. [Work supported by ONR.]