Using ships of opportunity for passive ocean sensing

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in passive ocean sensing. Commercial shipping vessels are ubiquitous in many parts of the ocean and can serve as stand-in sources for ocean sensing experiments. The ray-based blind deconvolution (RBD) technique for ocean waveguides estimates both the unknown waveform radiated by some source of opportunity and the channel impulse response (CIR) between the source and the receiving elements of an array of hydrophones using only measured signals, knowledge of the array geometry, and the local sound speed. This research explores the use of the RBD estimator to generate a robust, source-independent, acoustic observable from measurements of ships of opportunity and the use this observable together with state-of-the-art signal processing tools in solving underwater acoustics inverse problems, such as source localization and tomography.Ph.D