Inversion of Lloyd Mirror Field for Determining a Source's Track

This paper describes a simple approach for inferring the depth and track of a sound source at short ranges by inversion of acoustic field data at a set of sea bottom hydrophones. At short ranges, the acoustic field consists of a dominant Lloyd mirror (LM) signal from the direct and surface-reflected ray paths and a series of bottom-reflected paths that modulate the LM signal. A computationally efficient propagation model based on the method of images is developed to calculate replica fields for the inversion. The matched field inversion method for inferring the source depth and track is demonstrated using data from an experiment carried out in shallow water off the east coast of Canada. The estimated values were in very good agreement with independent measurements taken during the experiment.