Underwater acoustic slant range measurements related to weather and sea state

Abstract

Underwater range measurements are key factor in underwater acoustic positioning, used in Long Base-Line (LBL) or Ultra Short Base-Line (USBL) computing techniques. These measurements are commonly carried out through acoustic communications between modems and their accuracy can be affected by different factors, such as sea state, weather conditions, and obstacles in the line of sight propagation. This is especially important in shallow waters areas, where others phenomena such as multi-path have to be considered. Therefore, range accuracy and the associated position estimation errors are an important area of research. Here, we addressed the relation between range measurements variability and sea state (i.e. currents or waves height) as proxy of real-world conditions, affecting acoustic positioning performances. For that purpose, a long-term deployment have been carried out in the underwater cabled observatory OBSEA, which provide different measurements of the sea and weather state.