Abstract:
Modeling the propagation of high-frequency sound in shallow water environments often requires the inclusion of stochastic effects in order to provide realistic results. The inclusion of these effects may cause the model to be more computationally intensive and difficult to run. It is therefore desirable to know when these effects are significant, and when they may be ignored. One method of determining this significance is to determine the probability that the ray paths traced by a deterministic ray tracing model will occur in the stochastic environment; if the probability is low that the deterministic ray path is nearly correct, then stochastic effects must be included. This paper discusses a method for determining these ray path probabilities given an average variability in the sound speed and a correlation length. This paper will concentrate on spatial variations, though a procedure for including variations with time will be discussed. [Work supported by ONR.]