A report on the 3-D acoustic working group meeting at Long Beach, MS July 7-8, 1988

At the request of ONR Code 11250A, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Dr. James F. Lynch) convened a workshop to bring together a group of acoustic and ocean modelers to review and discuss 1. the state of development and the need for three-dimensional numerical acoustic research propagation and scattering models; 2. the interfacing of acoustic models with available oceanographic data and ocean model outputs. The workshop was hosted by the Institute for Naval Oceanography (Dr. Ching-Sang Chiu) at Long Beach, MS on July 7-8, 1988. This report summarizes the research presentations and the recommendations made by the group. The workshop was an initial attempt to promote the interaction between the ocean and acoustic modeling communities. This interaction between the communities is essential to the development of truly interactive basic research acoustic and ocean models. We anticipate more workshops of such nature to be held in the future. The findings and recommendations generated by these workshops are expected to have a strong impact on the direction of future three-dimensional modeling research in both acoustics and oceanography .Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research under contract Number N00014-88-K-0363

Modeling seafloor geoacoustic interaction with a numerical scattering chamber

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 1994. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 96 (1994): 973-990, doi:10.1121/1.410271.A numerical scattering chamber (NSC) has been developed to compute backscatter functions for geologically realistic seafloor models. In the NSC, solutions are computed to the elastic (or anelastic) wave equation by the finite-difference method. This has the following advantages: (a) It includes all rigidity effects in the bottom including body and interface waves. (b) It can be applied to pulse beams at low grazing angles. (c) Both forward scatter and backscatter are included. (d) Multiple interactions between scatterers are included. (e) Arbitrary, range-dependent topography and volume heterogeneity can be treated simultaneously. (f) Problems are scaled to wavelengths and periods so that the results are applicable to a wide range of frequencies. (g) The method considers scattering from structures with length scales on the order of acoustic wavelengths. The process is discussed for two examples: a single facet on a flat, homogeneous seafloor and a canonically rough, homogeneous seafloor. Representing the backscattered field by a single, angle-dependent coefficient is an oversimplification. In a strong scattering environment, time spread of the field is a significant issue and an angle-dependent separation of the wave field may not be valid.This work was carried out under support from the Office of Naval Research Acoustic Reverberation Special Research (Grant Number N00014-90-J-149