Temporal coherence of the acoustic field forward propagated through a continental shelf with random internal waves

An analytical model derived from normal mode theory for the accumulated effects of range-dependent multiple forward scattering is applied to estimate the temporal coherence of the acoustic field forward propagated through a continental-shelf waveguide containing random three-dimensional internal wav...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gong, Zheng, Chen, Tianrun, Ratilal, Purnima, Makris, Nicholas
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Acoustical Society of America (ASA) 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97629
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4369-296X
Description
Summary:An analytical model derived from normal mode theory for the accumulated effects of range-dependent multiple forward scattering is applied to estimate the temporal coherence of the acoustic field forward propagated through a continental-shelf waveguide containing random three-dimensional internal waves. The modeled coherence time scale of narrow band low-frequency acoustic field fluctuations after propagating through a continental-shelf waveguide is shown to decay with a power-law of range to the −1/2 beyond roughly 1 km, decrease with increasing internal wave energy, to be consistent with measured acoustic coherence time scales. The model should provide a useful prediction of the acoustic coherence time scale as a function of internal wave energy in continental-shelf environments. The acoustic coherence time scale is an important parameter in remote sensing applications because it determines (i) the time window within which standard coherent processing such as matched filtering may be conducted, and (ii) the number of statistically independent fluctuations in a given measurement period that determines the variance reduction possible by stationary averaging.