Subbottom profiling using a ship towed line array and geoacoustic inversion

Bottom profiling traditionally uses broadband signals received on a line array at long ranges to estimate the bottom layer structure and thickness. In this paper, a subbottom profiling method is developed and applied to a ship-towed line array using the same ship towed source to estimate the subbottom layer structure and thickness. A ship towed line-array system can be used to estimate bottom properties using geoacoustic inversion and can cover a wide area in a short time. It needs some prior information about the subbottom structure and layer thickness, without which the solution can be ambiguous and even erratic when resolving parameters over a wide area. It is shown that the required subbottom information can be obtained from the time-angle relation by beamforming the same acoustic signal data used for geoacoustic inversion. The time-angle analysis is used to expose the prevalent physics intrinsic to geoacoustic inversion. One finds that the tau-p relation of the bottom and the bottom reflection coefficients, sampled at discrete angles associated with bottom and multiple surface-bottom returns, are often adequate, for many practical applications, to uniquely determine the geoacoustic bottom at low (< or =1 kHz) frequencies.

A comparison of bistatic scattering from two geologically distinct abyssal hills

The bistatic scattering characteristics of two geologically distinct abyssal hills located on the western flank of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, known as B' and C', are experimentally compared using data acquired with low-frequency towed-array systems at 1/2 convergence zone (approximately 33 km) stand-off. The comparison is significant because the abyssal hills span the two classes of elevated seafloor crust that cover the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The highly lineated B' feature is representative of abyssal hills composed of outside corner crust, the most commonly occurring category, whereas the domed C' promontory is representative of the rougher, low-aspect-ratio abyssal hills composed of inside corner crust. The latter are less common and usually restricted to segment valley margins. The mean biazimuthal scattering distributions of the two abyssal hills each exhibit Lambertian behavior with comparable albedos, suggesting that the distinction between abyssal hills composed of differing crust is not significant in modeling long-range reverberation. The adverse effect of using bathymetry that undersamples seafloor projected area in scattering strength analysis is also quantified with data from the B' ridge. Specifically, the use of undersampled bathymetry can lead to significant overestimates in the strength of seafloor scattering.

Matched-field processing using measured replica fields

An approach for avoiding the problem of environmental uncertainty is tested using data from the TESPEX experiments. Acoustic data basing is an alternative to the difficult task of characterizing the environment by performing direct measurements and solving inverse problems. A source is towed throughout the region of interest to obtain a database of the acoustic field on an array of receivers. With this approach, there is no need to determine environmental parameters or solve the wave equation. Replica fields from an acoustic database are used to perform environmental source tracking [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 3335-3341 (1993)], which exploits environmental complexity and source motion.