Development of multipurpose signal attribute and environmental parameter databases from combatant sensors

This paper describes developments in the Sonar Active Boundary Loss Estimation (SABLE) project. The objective of the project is to produce high-resolution, georeferenced signal and feature attribute databases from combatant sonar systems and to derive geoacoustic parameters from the databases in support of Fleet requirements. The SABLE program is motivated by a variety of factors, including the need to operate in anisotropic (littoral and shallow-water) environments, decreasing resources, and advances in ADP hardware that now make approaches such as SABLE possible. We present an overview of a prototype full implementation of the SABLE process from the ship's sensor to the production of a gridded, georeferenced database. The overview includes the integration of environmental information into the database as well as sorted/matched eigenray information derived from a customized eigenray model. Unique features of the full database include the ability to sort/display feature attributes as a function of various constraints such as geometric conditions (sonar depression/elevation angle, azimuth of observation, bottom grazing angle, etc.), sonar acoustic parameters (pulse type, frequency, bandwidth, etc.), or any other feature attribute in the database. Examples of various data visualization and analysis tools are also presented.