The Acoustic Laboratory for Marine Applications (ALMA) applied to fluctuating environment analysis

The Acoustic Laboratory for Marine Applications (ALMA) has been used to address problems in underwater acoustics, such as sound propagation in fluctuating environments. In this work, data from the ALMA-2016 at-sea campaign are used to analyze the ocean fluctuation's influence on sound propagation in a shallow-water waveguide. The experiment took place in November 2016 on the continental shelf of the eastern coast of the island of Corsica. A source and a receiver array were 9.3 km apart in a nearly constant water depth of 100 m. A thermistor chain was moored near the source to monitor sound speed fluctuations. The source emitted a variety of signals from which the chirp (1–13 kHz) is used to extract the waveguide eigenrays. To do so, a time-domain beamforming is performed on the match-filtered received signals with an automatic detection of local maxima in the time of arrival/direction of arrival (TOA/DOA) domain. A 2 min acquisition period of more than 13 h duration shows significant fluctuations in eigenray TOAs/DOAs. Qualitative comparisons with synthetic signals obtained from simulations permit reproduction of the observed eigenray fluctuations without including range dependence of the sound-speed profile. In addition, the joint analysis of the probability density function of the normalized acoustic intensity and of the thermistor chain data highlights the time dependence of the received signal characteristics.