Applications of a Motion Compensation Stabilized Vertical Array of Hydrophones

When a vertical array of hydrophones is used to determine the location of a submerged acoustic source in the ocean, performance is limited by the quality of the data, especially when there is interference from ambient noise and other sources or when there are uncertainties in the parameters of the environment. High-quality data may be obtained by anchoring a vertical array on the seafloor, but this time-consuming approach does not allow frequent deployments and mobility. By using motion compensation to eliminate the vertical motion of an array that is deployed from a surface platform, it may be possible to obtain high-quality data with a rapidly deployable system. Other applications that could benefit from this capability include the geoacoustic inverse problem of estimating the parameters of the sediment and studying the effects of horizontal diffraction and horizontal multi-paths for global-scale problems.