Towards Understanding and Exploiting Effects of Sediment Heterogeneity on Seabed Reflection and Scattering

The impact of the seabed on acoustic energy propagating in the ocean environment is significant. It often is the controlling factor in frequency dependent transfer function between source and receiver and in addition is often the controlling factor for energy losses. While much has been learned over the last decades, the seabed and sub-seabed remains largely unexplored and poorly understood. Simple ~effective-medium~ models sometimes give adequate predictions, but theyfail to provide understanding about the mechanisms that control seabed attenuation, reflection, and scattering. Fundamental questions remain. In the proposed work, we seek to develop an understanding of how sediment heterogeneity affects seabed reflection, and then the inverse of problem: how to extract heterogeneity information from observations.