A 100-m hydrophone array with 32 channels was deployed on top of a New England Seamount from August 2024 to June 2025. This array was companied with two fixed sources, one at 100 km and the other at 120 km range from the array location. The array was deployed in the pathway of the Gulf Stream within the SOFAR channel and observed SOFAR channel duct variability as a function of Gulf Stream meandering. When the Gulf Stream positioned the array in Sargasso Sea water, the axis of the SOFAR channel was nominally around 800 m. But when the Gulf Stream shifted and caused the array to reside in Slope Sea water, the SOFAR channel deepened. The observed acoustic propagation variability on top of the seamount from Gulf Stream meander is reproduced by parabolic equation (PE) models. Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.
Newhall et al. (Wed,) studied this question.