Engineering Commons^™

Adaptive Passive Fathometer Processing, Martin Siderius, Heechun Song, Peter Gerstoft, William S. Hodgkiss, Paul Hursky, Chris H. Harrison

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recently, a technique has been developed to image seabed layers using the ocean ambient noise field as the sound source. This so called passive fathometer technique exploits the naturally occurring acoustic sounds generated on the sea-surface, primarily from breaking waves. The method is based on the cross-correlation of noise from the ocean surface with its echo from the seabed, which recovers travel times to significant seabed reflectors. To limit averaging time and make this practical, beamforming is used with a vertical array of hydrophones to reduce interference from horizontally propagating noise. The initial development used conventional beamforming, but significant improvements …