Development and Experimental Validation of Endfire Synthetic Aperture Sonar for Sediment Acoustics Studies

Seafloor sediment acoustic returns are comprised of scattering from both the sediment-water interface and the sediment volume. For low frequencies, volume scattering is often the dominant mechanism; however, direct measurements of this component have rarely been made, owing to the large beamwidths typically associated with low-frequency echosounder systems. When beamwidths are large, the sediment ...