Unified Description of Scattering and Propagation FY14 Annual Report

: The long-term goal of the research is to increase the physical understanding of acoustic propagation and scattering in continental shelf and slope environments in the 50-4000 Hz band. This includes both the physics of the seabed and the coupling to physical mechanisms in the water column in complex range- and azimuth-dependent littoral waveguides. For FY14, the first objective was to investigate the statistics of the mode intensity that result from scattering from a randomly rough seabed surface in a shallow water environment. The specific objective was to examine the feasibility of using a 2-way coupled mode methodology to analyze observed monostatic reverberation collected off Panama City, FL in 2013 in the 2-4 kHz band. The second objective was to extract information about the frequency dependence of seabed attenuation for a soft thick sediment. A third objective was to use ship radiated sound to extract marginal probability distributions for both alpha and gamma, in a shallow water environment with a sandy seabed.