Remote sensing of ocean sediment volume reverberation

Abstract

An experimental study was performed to establish a technique for measuring the volume reverberation from ocean sediments. Two types of sediments (aggregate and fine sand) were used in this study. The inhomogeneity within the sediment caused considerable sample-to-sample fluctuation in the scattered waveform. This fluctuation was removed by spatial averaging to obtain a mean value over the sampling area. A approximate model for volume reverberation from sediments was developed for an acoustic pulse with an exponential decay. The results are promising. Combining the model and the experimental results, the volume scattering coefficient obtained for the aggregate is 0.0624 ± 0.007 m" 3 and for fine sand is 0.0413 ± 0.007 m" 3 . The latter result is close to the coefficient obtained from a cloud-of-small-spheres model for wavelengths much greater than the particle size.