Study of horizontal multipaths and ray chaos due to ocean mesoscale structure

Long-range ocean acoustic propagation in the presence of idealized mesoscale structure is studied by first deriving a two-dimensional horizontal-plane parabolic wave equation that follows from the adiabatic mode approximation. In the geometric limit, a nonautonomous Hamiltonian dynamical system having one degree of freedom is derived. A stochastic formalism is developed to analyze this nonintegrable dynamical system. The main result is that on average two rays that are initially separated by an infinitesimal amount diverge exponentially at a rate given by the Lyapunov exponent that has been calculated theoretically and compared to numerical experiments with agreement to two decimal places. The practical implication of this result is that tomographic inversions based on assumed pointwise accurate ray predictions might not be possible beyond the "predictability horizon" of many thousands of kilometers, due to horizontal-plane multipaths induced by naturally occurring mesoscale activity.