Three-dimensional mapping of evolving internal waves during the Shallow Water 2006 experiment.

Detailed knowledge of sound speed profiles and the sound speed profile's spatial and temporal variability resulting from internal waves (IWs) are indispensable to investigating significant acoustic field fluctuations in shallow water. A strategy to obtain a time-varying, three-dimensional (3D) IW temperature field is presented. It uses two types of simultaneous measurements: dense observations from a farm of thermistor strings and IW surface expressions from a ship-based radar. Using data from the Shallow Water 2006 experiment, the temperature field, over multiple kilometers in range, was reconstructed and, fed to a 3D acoustic model to demonstrate IW impacts on acoustic propagation.