Piecewise coherent mode processing of acoustic data recorded on two horizontally separated vertical line arrays

Motivated by measurements made in the 2004 Long-Range Ocean Acoustic Propagation Experiment (LOAPEX), the problem of mode processing transient acoustic signals collected on two nearby vertical line arrays is considered. The first three moments (centroid, variance, and skewness) of broadband distributions of acoustic energy with fixed mode number (referred to as modal group arrivals) are estimated. It is shown that despite the absence of signal coherence between the two arrays and poor high mode number energy resolution, the centroid and variance of these distributions can be estimated with tolerable errors using piecewise coherent mode processing as described in this paper.