Through-the-Sensor Sonar Performance Prediction and Optimization

Sonar performance predictions are often unreliable due to the lack of accurate information about the acoustic properties of the ocean around the globe. We propose to demonstrate an environmental estimation technique that uses reverberation from active sonar transmissions to infer environmental properties including the sound speed profile, the seafloor geoacoustic properties, and the geographically varying seafloor scattering strengths. By exploiting the linear dependence of the reverberation level on the seafloor scattering strength, an analytic method for estimating the scattering strengths can be used to greatly reduce the computational burden and increase the accuracy of the estimated environmental parameters. The result of this environmental estimation will be a fully three dimensional (3D) estimate of the environment, which can then be used to estimate the probability of detection and probability of false alarm versus range, depth, and azimuth relative to the sonar. The estimated environment will then be used to determine a set of sonar transmission parameters which optimize performance.