Synthetic Aperture Sonars Performance and Randomly Varying Sound Speeds in the Water Column

摘要

Random sound speed fluctuations are prevalent in the ocean, even over distance scales of only a few meters (the so called 'fine structure' and 'microstructure'). Since synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) measurements involve repeatedly 'pinging' the target, these random sound speed fluctuations will cause the time of flight to the target to vary between pings. These time variations may produce significant phase errors in the array. degrading system performance. This paper intends to study the effect on SAS system performance of random sound speed fluctuations as evidenced in simulations. The approach is to modify an existing Mat lab simulation to include a ping-to-ping variation of the sound speed characterized by a Gaussian distribution, then compare results to the non-varying case.