The acoustic propagation environment surrounding the New England seamounts

Abstract

The New England Seamounts lie in a complex oceanographic environment that frequently sees both the colder Slope Sea waters and the warmer Sargasso Sea waters. The Gulf Stream, a meandering current that separates these two bodies of water, can be difficult to locate and frequently produces cold-core and warm-core eddies, complicating ocean modelling efforts. Regional temperature and salinity profile measurements gathered by the Argo program enable an investigation of the accuracy of the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM), a popular ocean circulation model. Simple range-independent calculations of acoustic propagation conditions provide a means of characterizing the acoustic environment by detailing common propagation paths associated with the New England Seamounts region. Contrasting the range-independent calculations for the Argo measurements with those of the oceanographic model indicates that persistent temperature features absent from the model impact predictions of the acoustic propagation environment.