Inversion of shallow water bottom sediment properties using AN/SQS-53C reverberation level data from exercise LWAD 99-1

Abstract

Inversion techniques are used to infer bottom sedimentary characteristics using AN/SQS-53C Reverberation Level (RL) data gathered during Exercise LWAD 99-1. Analysis was conducted to determine the correlation between sediment type and beam RL time series statistics, including slope and detrended higher order statistics (standard deviation, skew, and kurtosis). A geographic contour plot of the spatial distribution of sediments was generated from the deviation of the RL slope of individual beamform data from the area-wide average RL slope. The resulting plot shows features similar to that of the pre-exercise sedimentary characterization map. Higher order statistics are found to be non- Gaussian which has signal processing implications