Passive Ocean Acoustic Thermometry With Machine Learning

Passive ocean acoustic thermometry (POAT) needs long accumulation time to achieve high accuracy. This article provides a machine learning-based method, Random Forest, to obtain the averaged sound speed (AVSS). With supervised learning, the AVSS can be estimated from half an hour accumulated noise cross-correlation functions (NCFs). Based on the feature importance analysis, an empirical equation is proposed to briefly describe the relationships between the features. The results of estimations are compared among different methods to demonstrate the advantage of the machine learning-based approach. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.