Statistics of High Frequency Acoustic Boundary Scattering and Vector Ambient Noise Fields

The long-term goal of the present high-frequency scattering statistics work is to examine the links between environmental parameters of shallow water boundaries and the statistics of high frequency, broadband acoustic fields using a combination of at-sea measurements, ground truth and theoretical modeling. The influence of the properties of the boundaries to the scattered envelope statistics and noise fields will be examined in detail. The proposed project is designed to (1) examine experimental acoustic data to determine how environmental properties (e.g. roughness or bubble clouds) influence statistical distributions obtained with broadband, acoustic systems in shallow water including SAS and vector sensor systems; (2) test current models or develop models where none exist which link measured environmental parameters (e.g. roughness, bubble distributions) and system characteristics (e.g. bandwidth, frequency) to predict these statistics in realistic shallow-water ocean environments. The proposed effort will lead to methods for modeling and predicting properties that may be used to minimize the negative impact of the environment on: 1) detection and classification of targets on or near the seafloor in shallow water; and 2) processing of data taken with vector sensor arrays.