2023_programme: Acoustic reconstruction of ASW serials during NATO exercises

• Session: 13. Sonar Performance Modelling and Verification: Applications to Active and Passive Sonar
  Organiser(s): Mathieu Colin, Mark Prior, Kevin Heaney and Dale Ellis
• Lecture: Acoustic reconstruction of ASW serials during NATO exercises [invited]
  Paper ID: 2074
  Author(s): Strode Christopher, Akbulut Burak, Been Robert, Tesei Alessandra
  Presenter: Tesei Alessandra
  Abstract: NATO and its navies commit significant resources in regular exercising of anti-submarine warfare tactics conducted during at sea trials. To ensure maximum training benefit and increase lessons learned, an analysis team is deployed to conduct reconstruction of ship and submarine relative geometry throughout each exercise serial. The reconstruction highlights those time periods within which surface ships successfully maintained sonar contact on the submarine – based on the correlation between reported contact position and actual submarine position. This paper describes additional analysis performed by NATO STO CMRE in which we seek to elicit the reasons behind contact periods or lack thereof. To this end, we conduct acoustic predictions throughout an exercise area as a function of location, bearing, sonar depth, submarine depth, and submarine aspect. When combined with a geometric reconstruction of ship and submarine positions; the analysis highlights those periods in which detection is expected. In addition, we can highlight the primary reason behind detection opportunities – whether resulting from the sonar and submarine depth combination or from submarine aspect. Such analysis directly correlates sonar performance with the acoustic environment (i.e. presence of layers) and submarine tactics (depth and aspect). The paper primarily describes the methods employed and provides some representative output.
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• Corresponding author: Mr Christopher Strode
  Affiliation: NATO CMRE
  Country: Italy
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