Objective
A technique will be developped and verified for real-time monitoring of ocean currents in the coastal zone. This technique will be a considerable improvement of existing methods because it will provide three-dimensional maps of the current field over horizontal spatial scales up to 100 km and throughout the water column. It is based on a new, innovative refinement of ocean acoustic tomography, called Matched Non-reciprocity Tomography (MNT), which has been developped at the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, Russia, to overcome the failure of the traditional ocean acoustic tomography when applied to currents in shallow water.
The present research focuses on theoretical studies and on the application of the MNT technique to process the data of an experiment to take place in 1996 in the Strait of Gibraltar, an ocean region that has been extensively studied by physical oceanographers. This "Gibraltar experiment" will be carried out independently from the present project by research teams from Germany, Canada, and the USA. This independent research will provide results on the acoustic propagation in the Strait of Gibraltar and on the feasibility of some methods of acoustic monitoring in this region. An additional, specialised data processing in the present project will make it possible to enrich the contents of the Gibraltar experiment, to perform for the first time the MNT-based current inversion with real data, and to compare the performance of the MNT and other acoustic techniques of ocean currents monitoring under environmental conditions, when both traditional techniques and the MNT are simultaneously applied.
The inversion results are expected to be of a significant oceanographic value. Experience gained with application of the MNT technique in the Strait of Gibraltar will be used together with theoretical studies to develop plans for a permanent acoustic system to monitor currents in coastal regions.
Further results are, among others, a further development of the MNT method; quantitative estimates of contributions to acoustic field non-reciprocity; techniques to separate contributions to experimentally measured acoustic non-reciprocity resulting from different physical processes in the ocean; normal-mode- and ray-based efficient numerical models for accurate simulation of underwater acoustic fields and their non-reciprocity; estimates of maximal mismatches in environmental parameters; refined full-wave technique and its numerical implementation for efficient sound speed field tomographic inversion; and refined MNT-based technique and its numerical implementation for efficient inversions for flow velocity field. The results of the research will be presented at international scientific conferences and published in Russian and international scientific journals.
Call for proposal
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71110 Heraklion, Crete
Greece