statistical analysis of acoustic transmission scintillation in the 2014 Nordic Seas Experiment

Abstract

The propagation of acoustic signals through an underwater waveguide adds randomness to the received signal, called scintillation. For a fully saturated field, this scintillation features statistical properties that can be measured and estimated. Many analyses were conducted in the past for finding and estimating the characteristics of these statistical properties. In February 2014, the 2014 Nordic Seas Experiment was conducted in Norway, in which acoustic broadband signals were transmitted and received frequently, propagating through a waveguide on the continental shelf, and large sets of acoustic data were gathered. The work presented here shows analysis of the statistical properties of the data recorded in the 2014 Nordic Seas Experiment. We show that the received signals indeed comply with a fully saturated field by analyzing the distribution of the intensity and of several representations of energy. We also show how the number of coherent cells can be estimated and that the statistical properties of it fit the theory and previous work.