Acoustic propagation modeling using sound velocity profiles estimated from high resolution temperature data

An accurate sound velocity profile (SVP) is an important input for underwater acoustic propagation modeling. The SVP is largely driven by the temperature of the water column, especially at shallower depths. Measuring the SVP in high spatial and temporal resolution is challenging with traditional instrumentation, however techniques exist to produce high resolution temperature measurements that can be used to derive estimates of the SVP. Fiber optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) offers an improvement of several orders of magnitude over traditional singular point measurement devices and has the ability to measure temperature over large range and depth scales in an efficient manner. A DTS system was towed for 172 nm off the coast of New England over several days. The measured temperature data was used to estimate the SVP across the range and depth and will be compared to traditional environmental data sets, such as HYCOM. A comparison of modeled acoustic propagation using different resolution SVPs will be presented.