Analysis of shallow-water experimental acoustic data including a comparison with a broad-band normal-mode-propagation model

Channel temporal variability, resulting from fluctuations in oceanographic parameters, is an important issue for reliable communications in shallow-water-long-range acoustic propagation. As part of an acoustic model validation exercise, audio-band acoustic data and oceanographic data were collected from shallow waters off the West Coast of Scotland. These data have been analyzed for temporal effects. The average impulse response for this channel has been compared with simulations using a fast broad-band normal-mode propagation model. In this paper, we also introduce a novel technique for estimating and removing the bistatic reverberation contribution from the data. As propagation models do not necessarily account for reverberation, it has to be extracted from the signals when comparing measured and modeled transmission loss.