Evaluation procedure for environmental acoustic models

The underwater acoustics community has been flooded over the past 10 to 15 years with a variety of models for wave propagation, reverberation and ambient noise. Unfortunately, most of the effort is directed toward model development, and there is a serious lack of effort in the setting of standards for evaluating model performance. As a result, many models are put into use without sufficient test or evaluation. This paper describes the needs for model evaluation and outlines a procedure for subjecting models to a series of evaluation tests. Specific results are presented in which a series of surface reverberation measurements are used to evaluate the underlying concepts and computational procedures used in NISSM II, a standard Navy sonar model.