UNDERWATER BISTATIC SOUND REVERBERATION NEAR CONTINENTAL-SLOPE

An experimental study of reverberation at frequencies of hundreds of hertz is carried out with the help of a receiver positioned on the bottom at the boundary between the shelf and the continental slope and a submerged source from a distant, drifting vessel. The lower boundary of the sound channel amounted to hundreds of meters and the propagation occurred with multiple reflections from the surface. It is shown that, even in the case of a strong wind, the main source of reverberation has been sound scattering by the floor uplifts reaching into the channel. The frequency spectrum of such floor reverberation turned out to be from 2 to 6 times wider than the spectrum of a direct signal arriving from a distant source. Several possible mechanisms of spectrum broadening are considered but none of them gives a convincing explanation for observed values.