Modeling the power delay profile of underwater acoustic channels — The effects of out-of-plane scattering and reverberation

Long reverberation tails are a feature of some shallow water acoustic channel impulse responses. We show two examples of underwater channels which exhibit this feature, and consider their properties in some more detail. Simple 2-D propagation modeling fails to reproduce this feature, and we employ Rev3D, a 3-D model handling bistatic reverberation, to include the effects of out-of-plane scattering and reverberation in the simulations. The modeling results are encouraging; although the measured levels are not perfectly matched, the importance of including reverberation in the modeling is clearly demonstrated.