The horizontal correlation of long range bottom reverberation in shallow water with inclined sea floor

The performance of active sonar system is seriously influenced by bottom reverberation in shallow water waveguide. It is important to understand the horizontal correlation of bottom reverberation for active towed-array processing techniques in shallow sea. However, little work had been done for the research on horizontal correlation of distant bottom reverberation. In this paper, a coupled mode reverberation model was applied for the horizontal correlation, and it was investigated as a function of receiving position, time and frequency. Calculations show that transverse correlation is greater than the longitudinal correlation in horizontal space for distant bottom reverberation. The adiabatic mode solution is introduced to derive the mathematic mode for horizontal correlation in the range-dependent waveguide with varying depth and the numerical results indicate that the influence of inclined sea floor on the horizontal correlation should be considered.