Effects of internal waves and turbulence on a horizontal aperture sonar

Random variability in the water column will affect the operation of a horizontal aperture sonar. Two sources of variability in shallow water are turbulence and internal waves. In a modeling study, the effects of turbulence and internal waves on a shallow-water imaging system are compared. The operational principles of a large aperture imaging system are first reviewed. A shallow-water internal wave model is developed by modifying the Garrett-Munk model. The internal waves are assumed to dissipate and drive the small-scale turbulence. The two phenomena are predicted to have markedly different effects on a system. Turbulence has short spatial correlation scales whose primary effects will be manifested in the variance of the acoustic phase. By contrast, internal waves will have much larger scattering but also a longer correlation scale. The primary acoustic quantity of interest for internal waves is shown to be the curvature of the phase as observed along the aperture. Properties of shallow-water internal waves are shown to preclude the use of standard acoustic calculations based on the Markov approximation. Using archival environmental data, sample calculations are presented for the site of a planned August 1996 experiment.