ASA 128th Meeting - Austin, Texas - 1994 Nov 28 .. Dec 02

5pUW6. Trans-Arctic propagation effects of changes in ice morphology.

Henrik Schmidt

Brian Tracey

Dept. of Ocean Eng., MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139

The objective of the Trans-Arctic Propagation (TAP) experiment carried out in the spring of 1994 was to investigate the feasibility of using acoustic thermometry for inferring changes in the Arctic climate [P. Mikhalevsky, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1760(A) (1993)]. An important issue is which acoustic property will provide the strongest climate change signature. The sensitivity of various properties of the acoustic field to changes in ice volume was investigated theoretically. A perturbation formulation for 3-D scattering from rough ice has been combined with the kraken normal-mode code to provide a model of the second-order statistics of the acoustic field. Such a hybrid model has been shown to provide excellent agreement with historical Arctic transmission loss data [LePage and Schmidt, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 1783--1795 (1994)]. We use this model to investigate the sensitivity of deterministic properties of the coherent field, such as modal loss, and modal phase and group velocity, to change in ice thickness and roughness statistics. In addition, the model has been use to investigate the sensitivity to changes in the ice cover of the higher-order statistics such as cross-modal correlation, and spatial correlation in general. Comparing these theoretical sensitivity measures, we discuss the potential performance of both deterministic and statistic acoustic thermometry in the Arctic.