Modeling Statistics of Fish Patchiness and Predicting Associated Influence on Statistics of Acoustic Echoes

LONG-TERM GOALS: To accurately describe the statistics of acoustic echoes due to the presence of fish, especially in the case of a long-range active sonar. Toward this goal, fundamental advances in the understanding of fish behavior, especially in aggregations, will be made under conditions relevant to the echo statistics problem. OBJECTIVES: To develop new models of behavior of fish aggregations, including the fission/fusion process, and to describe the echo statistics associated with the random fish behavior using existing formulations of echo statistics.
Sponsored in part by Office of Naval Research grant no. N00014-11-1-0151