Bottom reverberation in shallow water: Coherent properties as a function of bandwidth, waveguide characteristics, and scatterer distributions

Shallow water presents a difficult, reverberation-limited environment for active SONAR operations. It is important to understand the predictable structure of shallow-water reverberation in order to aid the design of processors and detectors which work properly in these environments. In this paper, the temporal characteristics of monostatic reverberation are predicted as a function of source bandwidth, source-receiver depth, and the propagation characteristics of range-independent shallow water. Results show that at early time, reverberation can be highly coherent across a vertical line array, violating the homogeneous noise assumption, while at late time the reverberation becomes increasingly uncorrelated. This is shown to be due to the insonification of independent bottom patches at late time. It is also shown that this decorrelation of the reverberation is dependent both on the propagation characteristics of the particular shallow-water environment, the correlation length scale of the scatterers, and the bandwidth of the source, with high-bandwidth sources causing decorrelated reverberation sooner than low-bandwidth sources. The results also show that there are several identifying characteristics in reverberation time series which may be useful for identifying the types of scatterers which cause reverberation during particular experiments. [S0001-4966(99)06212-8].