Effects of Small Scale Seafloor Roughness on Acoustic Reflectivity Measurements on the Newfoundland Shelf

In the last decade there has been a continued interest in the use of acoustic properties, in particular the amplitude of seismic reflections, for the prediction of the physical characteristics of marine sediments. These techniques generally assume a plane wave reflection from a smooth seafloor and do not utilise the contribution of energy scattered from a rough surface. The effect of seafloor roughness on the spectral content of seafloor echoes produced by a boomer profiling system (the Huntec Deep Towed High Resolution Seismic System) are discussed in this paper, Estimates of roughness using shot to shot coherence at discrete positions are compared to roughness obtained from a suite of bottom photographs. Information of a more regional nature have been obtained by display of the seismic profile along with reflectivity parameters and coherence functions.