Intensity statistics for dual-band, 500 km, ocean acoustic transmissions in the Philippine Sea 2010 experiment

The May 2010 component of the North Pacific Acoustic Laboratory's Philippine Sea experiment included low-frequency transmissions over a 500 km path from the APL-UW ship-suspended multi-port source to a distributed vertical line array (DVLA) with 149 working hydrophones spaced over most of the water column. The multi-port source has two acoustic resonances at approximately 200 and 300 Hz. To accommodate those resonances in this experiment, two M-sequence signals at those center frequencies were transmitted simultaneously. Data recorded over a 60 h data window in the experiment show deep fades in both frequency bands, i.e., frequency-dependent variations of 10–20 dB in acoustic arrival intensities on the DVLA. The measurements are processed with Wiener filtering based on source-monitoring receptions of the transmission on a hydrophone 20 m from the source, to compensate for effects of the power amplifier and the transducer. Statistics of the received acoustic intensities are reported for both frequency bands. Correlations in the intensity between these broadly separated frequency bands allow one to explore questions of the role in arrival-splitting (micro-multipathing) in the deep fades observed in this experiment. [Work supported by ONR.]