Estimating temperature and current using a pair of transceivers in a harbor environment

Abstract

Obtaining the horizontal variation of temperature and current fields of a water column usually requires travel-time measurements of acoustic signals traveling along different paths between several horizontally distributed transceivers. This study explores the possibility of using a pair of transceivers deployed in a highly-reverberant harbor environment to extract spatial information of the water. Multipath acoustic propagation of two main arrival groups, i.e., direct arrivals and arrivals reflecting off the harbor side, was observed in the pulse responses measured in the harbor environment during the flood tide. Compared with the direct point measurements of temperature and current, the path-averaged measurements show a similar temporal variation during the experiment, demonstrating the possibility of estimating the spatial variation of the currents and temperatures using the multipath acoustic propagation.