2023_programme: A Pulse-echo technique to estimate underwater sound speed

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  • Session: 16. Trends and Advances in Array Signal Processing
    Organiser(s): Angeliki Xenaki, Peter Gerstoft and Eliza Michalopoulou
  • Lecture: A Pulse-echo technique to estimate underwater sound speed
    Paper ID: 1994
    Author(s): Mousavi Seyed Mohammad Reza, Zedel Len
    Presenter: Mousavi Seyed Mohammad Reza
    Abstract: The ocean Sound Speed Profile (SSP) directly affects how acoustic waves propagate in the ocean. So, knowing the SSP is essential in many underwater acoustic applications, such as sound propagation modeling, underwater acoustic imaging, acoustic localization, and acoustic tracking. Underwater sound speed also provides information about the temperature structure using the relationship between ocean temperature and sound speed. SSPs are usually measured by a Sound Velocity Profiler (SVP) or derived using a Conductivity, Temperature, Depth (CTD) profiler. A significant part of the expense of these methods to estimate the SSP is the necessity to operate from a fixed platform for hours or even days.\n\nOur presentation focuses on remote sound speed profile estimation using an underwater acoustic pulse-echo inversion method. Depending on the applications, different geometry of transducers can be used. To estimate sound speed, the transducer transmits acoustic pulses to the medium, and SSP is estimated using received echo signals of marine organisms or the reflectors randomly spread on the seafloor. A longer array of transducers gives us a better estimation of sound speed, and we can take advantage of Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) to have a longer synthetic array and higher resolution sound speed estimation.\n\nWe simulate the synthetic received signals using an acoustic propagation model to assess the method’s accuracy. The model is based on ray acoustic propagation in layered media, excluding lateral sound speed variations. To model the reflected signals, we assume a large number of scatterers in the water column and the reflectors located on a random rough seafloor. To test the validity of our method, the sound speed profile used in the simulated received signal is compared to the one estimated by our approach.
  • Corresponding author: Mr Seyed Mohammad Reza Mousavi
    Affiliation: phd student at Memorial University of Newfoundland
    Country: Canada
    e-mail:

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