Mapping seabed acoustic reflection and scattering coefficients using tactical sonar systems

The authors investigate the application of a geo-acoustic inversion technique developed by Bishop et al. (1995) on active reverberation data collected from a US Navy exercise. The motivation of this work, the methodology, and results of geo-acoustic parameter extraction from data collected in the tactical experiment are presented. Analytical emphasis for this paper is on the spatial variability in geo-acoustic parameters observed in the test area, and its implications on the requirements for real time inversion techniques. The paper draws conclusions of the relationship of these results to historic geo-acoustic data for the test area