IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

The year-long Philippine Sea (2010-2011) experiment (PhilSea) was an extensive deep water acoustic propagation experiment in which there were six different sources transmitting to a water column spanning a vertical line array. The six sources were placed in an array with a radius of 330 km and transmitted at frequencies in the 200-300 Hz and 140-205 Hz bands. The PhilSea frequencies are higher than previous deep water experiments in the North Pacific for which modal analyses were performed. Further, the acoustic paths sample a two-dimensional area that is rich in internal tides, waves, and eddies. The PhilSea observations are, thus, a new opportunity to observe acoustic modal variability at higher frequencies than before and in an oceanographically dynamic region. This paper focuses on mode observations around the mid-water depths. The mode observations are used to compute narrowband statistics such as transmission loss and broadband statistics such as peak pulse intensity, travel time wander, time spreads, and scintillation indices. The observations are then compared with a new hybrid broadband transport theory. The model-data comparisons show excellent agreement for modes 1-10 and minor deviations for the rest. The discrepancies in the comparisons are related to the limitations of the hybrid model and oceanographic fluctuations other than internal waves. © 2020 Acoustical Society of America.

Department of Ocean Engineering

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Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Observations of low-frequency, long-range acoustic propagation in the Philippine Sea and comparisons with mode transport theory

In the Philippine Sea, from April 2010 to March 2011, a 330-km radius pentagonal acoustic transceiver array with a sixth transceiver in the center transmitted broadband signals with center frequencies between 172 and 275 Hz and 100 Hz bandwidth eight times a day every other day. The signals were recorded on a large-aperture vertical-line array located near the center of the pentagon at ranges of 129, 210, 224, 379, 396, and 450 km. The acoustic arrival structures are interpretable in terms of ray paths. Depth and time variability of the acoustic observations are analyzed for six ray paths (one from each transceiver) with similar vertical sampling properties in the main thermocline. Acoustic-field statistics treated include: (1) variances of phase and intensity, (2) vertical coherence and intensity covariance, (3) glinting and fadeout rates, and (4) intensity probability density functions. Several observed statistics are compared to predictions using Feynman path-integral theory assuming the Garrett-Munk internal-wave spectrum. In situ oceanographic observations support this assumption and are used to estimate spectral parameters. Data and theory differ at most by a factor of two and reveal the wave propagation regimes of unsaturated, partially saturated, and fully saturated. Improvements to the evaluation of path-integral quantities are discussed. © 2019 U.S. Government.

Fulltext

Observations of phase and intensity fluctuations for low-frequency, long-range transmissions in the Philippine Sea and comparisons to path-integral theory

Moored oceanographic sensors and satellite altimetry has revealed energetic diurnal and semi-diurnal internal tides in the Western Philippine Sea. Because the internal tides have a complex spatio-temporal pattern and large vertical displacements, these waves have the potential for causing strong acoustic variability. This talk will present a tidal analysis of signal fluctuations from the PhilSea09 experiment in which broadband signals with a center frequency of 275Hz and a bandwidth of 50 Hz were transmitted at the sound channel axis to a large aperture vertical array 185-km distant. Signal phase and amplitude statistics along distinct branches of the observed wavefronts will be analyzed and compared to ray-based model predictions using internal tide information obtained from moored oceanographic instruments at the source and receiver. Key issues are the acoustic effects of the internal tide nonlinearity, temporal stability, high mode structure, and complex horizontal interference patterns. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

The effects of internal tides on acoustic phase and amplitude statistics in the Philippine Sea

Mode travel time estimation in the presence of internal waves (IWs) is a challenging problem. IWs perturb the sound speed, which results in travel time wander and mode scattering. A standard approach to travel time estimation is to pulse compress the broadband signal, pick the peak of the compressed time series, and average the peak time over multiple receptions to reduce variance. The peak-picking approach implicitly assumes there is a single strong arrival and does not perform well when there are multiple arrivals due to scattering. This article presents a statistical model for the scattered mode arrivals and uses the model to design improved travel time estimators. The model is based on an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis of the mode time series. Range-dependent simulations and data from the Long-range Ocean Acoustic Propagation Experiment (LOAPEX) indicate that the modes are represented by a small number of EOFs. The reduced-rank EOF model is used to construct a travel time estimator based on the Matched Subspace Detector (MSD). Analysis of simulation and experimental data show that the MSDs are more robust to IW scattering than peak picking. The simulation analysis also highlights how IWs affect the mode excitation by the source. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Reduced rank models for travel time estimation of low order mode pulses

Second moments of mode amplitudes at fixed frequency as a function of separations in mode number, time, and horizontal distance are investigated using mode-based transport equations and Monte Carlo simulation. These second moments are used to study full-field acoustic coherence, including depth separations. Calculations for low-order modes between 50 and 250 Hz are presented using a deep-water Philippine Sea environment. Comparisons between Monte Carlo simulations and transport theory for time and depth coherence at frequencies of 75 and 250 Hz and for ranges up to 500 km show good agreement. The theory is used to examine the accuracy of the adiabatic and quadratic lag approximations, and the range and frequency scaling of coherence. It is found that while temporal coherence has a dominant adiabatic component, horizontal and vertical coherence have more equal contributions from coupling and adiabatic effects. In addition, the quadratic lag approximation is shown to be most accurate at higher frequencies and longer ranges. Last the range and frequency scalings are found to be sensitive to the functional form of the exponential decay of coherence with lag, but temporal and horizontal coherence show scalings that fall quite close to the well-known inverse frequency and inverse square root range laws.&nbsp;

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Coupled mode transport theory for sound transmission through an ocean with random sound speed perturbations: Coherence in deep water environments

In 2012, during two separate week-long deployments, underwater gliders outfitted with external hydrophones profiled the upper 100-200 m of the Monterey Bay. The environment contained various noises made by marine mammals, ships, winds, and earthquakes. Unlike hydrophone receivers moored to a fixed location, moving gliders measure noise variability across a wide terrain. However, underwater mobile systems have limitations such as instrument and flow noise, that are undesired. In order to estimate the system noise level, the hydrophones on the gliders had different gain settings on each deployment. The first deployment used a 0 dB gain during which the ambient noise recordings were dominated by the glider. The second used two hydrophones, one with a 0 dB gain and the other with 20 dB. Apart from system sounds, the higher-gain hydrophone also recorded far-away sources such as whales and ships. The noise recordings are used to estimate the spectrograms across depth and record time. The spectrograms are integrated with the glider engineering data to estimate histograms of noise power as a function of depth and glider velocity. The statistics from the two different deployments are compared to discuss the value of gliders with external hydrophones in ambient noise studies. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Monterey Bay ambient noise profiles using underwater gliders

Second order mode statistics as a function of range and source depth are presented from the Long Range Ocean Acoustic Propagation EXperiment (LOAPEX). During LOAPEX, low frequency broadband signals were transmitted from a ship-suspended source to a mode-resolving vertical line array. Over a one-month period, the ship occupied seven stations from 50 km to 3200 km distance from the receiver. At each station broadband transmissions were performed at a near-axial depth of 800 m and an off-axial depth of 350 m. Center frequencies at these two depths were 75 Hz and 68 Hz, respectively. Estimates of observed mean mode energy, cross mode coherence, and temporal coherence are compared with predictions from modal transport theory, utilizing the Garrett-Munk internal wave spectrum. In estimating the acoustic observables, there were challenges including low signal to noise ratio, corrections for source motion, and small sample sizes. The experimental observations agree with theoretical predictions within experimental uncertainty. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Observations and transport theory analysis of low frequency, acoustic mode propagation in the Eastern North Pacific Ocean

Array element localization is crucial for applications such as ocean acoustic tomography. Loss of navigation data makes it difficult to compensate for array motion when implementing operations such as mode filtering or beamforming. This paper presents a method for estimating missing array navigation data using an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) model. The method can be applied to estimate the location of some vertical array elements based on the location of the other elements. It assumes that second order statistics can be estimated from a set of navigation measurements for the full array. The paper applies the EOF-based method to estimate missing navigation data for the Long range Ocean Acoustic Propagation EXperiment (LOAPEX). The results are evaluated by examining how the errors in mooring motion estimation affect mode processing. In particular the paper analyzes the degradation in array gain and the errors in time of arrival for the low order modes. The error statistics indicate that use of the EOF method has a negligible effect on mode processing. © 2008 IEEE.

OCEANS 2008

Interpolation methods for vertical linear array element localization

Low frequency underwater sound propagation over ranges of 3.5 megameters or more has a complicated multipath arrival structure with early steep angle-arrivals, followed by an energetic finale composed of the lower order acoustic modes. Internal waves produce time-varying multipath and induce frequency-selective fading in the received signals. The low mode arrivals are strongly affected by internal waves, making it difficult to obtain precise travel time measurements for these signals. An equalizer along with suitable spatial filters, mitigates the multipath of the lower order modes. The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) measured at the output of the equalizer is used as an observable to localize modes, make time of arrival (TOA) measurements and measure the multipath spread of the modes. Results for the new mode equalizer on a simulated channel are presented. The mode equalizer is also tested on one of the North Pacific Acoustic Laboratory (NPAL) receptions.