Simultaneous bottom sampling by grabbing and echo sounding of bottom were made in selected sea areas around Sicily. First and second bottom echo signals received by EY500 Simrad scientific echo sounder (120 kHz, 7 deg aperture) were processed to extract parameters characterising hardness and roughness of bottom ground. In order to verify the classification capabilities of the proposed parameters, collected data were processed by means of Discriminant Analysis. Results were encouraging: the scatterplot of scores showed a dear gradient related to the bottom condition, and classification functions were able to correctly classify up to 90% of available data.
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