The physical properties of a reliable acoustic path （RAP） are analysed and subsequently a weighted-subspace~ fitting matched field （WSF-MF） method for passive localization is presented by exploiting the properties of the RAP environment. The RAP is an important acoustic duct in the deep ocean, which occurs when the receiver is placed near the bottom where the sound velocity exceeds the maximum sound velocity in the vicinity of the surface. It is found that in the RAP environment the transmission loss is rather low and no blind zone of surveillance exists in a medium range. The ray theory is used to explain these phenomena. Furthermore, the analysis of the arrival structures shows that the source localization method based on arrival angle is feasible in this environment. However, the conventional methods suffer from the complicated and inaccurate estimation of the arrival angle. In this paper, a straightforward WSF-MF method is derived to exploit the information about the arrival angles indirectly. The method is to minimize the distance between the signal subspace and the spanned space by the array manifold in a finite range-depth space rather than the arrival-angle space. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the features of the method, and the results are explained by the arrival structures in the RAP environment.
The normal mode model for scattering in shallow water is employed to investigate the forward scattering with a target crossing the source-receiver axial line. An experiment was conducted in a littoral environment to analyze forward scattering by a slowly moving object. The theoretical and experimental results show that the sound field aberration takes minimum values if the object is located mid-point along the source-receiver line, whereas it attains its maximum if the object is close to the source or receiver. The total field is either enhanced or suppressed if the object crosses different Fresnel zones. In addition, the duration of shad- ow-induced aberration is dependent on the width of the first Fresnel zone, which is longest at the mid-point of the source-receiver line.
Many research results show that ocean ambient noise and wind speed are highly relevant, and the surface wind speed can be effectively inverted using ocean noise data. In most deep-sea cases, the ambient noise of medium frequency is mainly determined by the surface wind, and there is a conventional relationship between them. This paper gives an equation which shows this relationship firstly, and then a surface-wind inversion method is proposed. An efficient particle filter is used to estimate the speed distribution, and the results exhibit more focused close to the actual wind speed. The method is verified by the measured noise data, and analysis results showed that this approach can accurately give the trend of sea surface wind speed.
