In the ocean, acoustic signal propagation is subject to impacts from the stochastic sound-speed field. Commonly assessed causes of this randomness include internal waves (IW) and density compensated thermohaline structure often referred to as SPICE. Here, we consider the impacts of IW's using a stochastic numerical simulation. The parabolic propagation code RAM is used to generate an ensemble of acoustic responses to a point source which leads to a range and vertical dependent field. The analysis is carried out by calculating a sample correlation and covariance matrix (SCM) for vertical line arrays (VLA) positioned at a grid on the field. Each VLA is several wavelengths long and overlaps it neighbor vertically by one half of the array length. Singular value decompositions (SVD's) and adaptive beamforming (ABF) is applied to the SCM's. If there is no coherence loss due to the IW induced randomization, there is one nonzero eigenvalue of the SVD; otherwise, the remaining ones account for the loss due to scattering which maps directly to loss of SNR. Since the eigenvectors for a linear, equally spaced array are asymptotically close to plane waves, these projections into adjacent steering angles indicate the energy representing the scattered field.
Baggeroer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.