Rapid acoustic field computations within environmental uncertainty bounds.

Oceanographic and geo-acoustic variability in the shallow water can dominate acoustic propagation. Often the environment is critically undersampled, compared to the sensitivity of the full-field propagation model used [such as the Parabolic Equation (PE) model]. For regions with environmental uncertainty (which is known from measurements or models), there will be a Minimum Achievable Uncertainty (MAU) in acoustic propagation modeling (Transmission Loss). Given this MAU, it is proposed that field interpolation techniques be applied to speed up the acoustic propagation computation, consistent with keeping the interpolation errors below the MAU. Techniques for estimating the uncertainty in TL and speeding up the broadband range-dependent computation using the Navy Standard PE model will be presented. For fully 3-D field computations in a range-dependent environment, the speed up is expected to be several orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]