Transverse horizontal spatial coherence in shallow water

Since the advent of large-aperture array processing, more and more attention has been paid to the sound field correlation, which has fundamental limit to the array gain of spatial coherent signal processing. The two dominant mechanisms that degrade the spatial coherence are normal modes (or multi-paths) interference and the environmental variability caused by several relevant oceanographic processes. In the present study, the transverse horizontal spatial coherence of explosive signals has been studied experimentally by a bottom-mounted array in the Northern South China Sea. And the effects of normal mode interference on the transverse horizontal spatial coherence have been analyzed numerically. Expressed in terms of wavelengths, the coherence length is shown to be larger than 170λ/185λ at acoustic frequency 508-640Hz/80-101Hz in shallow water. It is much greater than Carey’s shallow-water result 30λ estimated from array signal gain after assuming a specific functional form for the coherence (The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 104, 831 (1998)). It, however, is consistent with Rouseff’s modelling result of a coherence length larger than 100λ (The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 138, 2256 (2015)). Both Carey and Rouseff argue that the transverse horizontal spatial coherence length depends only weakly on range, in direct. In the present study, however, the coherence length is shown to depend highly on source-receiver range, and it fluctuates synchronously with the sound-field intensity while range varies