Environmental Acoustic Variability Characterization for Adaptive Sampling

During shallow water antisubmarine warfare missions, environmental uncertainty significantly impacts Fleet asset performance. Oceanographic sensor availability, acoustic sensor coverage, and operational time limitations put constraints on efforts to observe large ocean areas. To address these challenges, NRL researchers have advanced and incorporated applied research technologies developed under several disciplines to implement an adaptive sensor placement capability that, under certain assumptions, minimizes the uncertainty in forecasted information. The technologies incorporated include ocean data quality control, rapidly nested oceanographic modeling, data assimilation, ensemble representation of uncertainty, acoustic performance modeling, and Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (ETKF) adaptive sampling.
Published in NRL Review, p123-126, 2008. Sponsored in part by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), Washington, D.C.