LONG-TERM GOALS The long-term goal of the present high-frequency scattering statistics work is to examine the links between environmental parameters of shallow water boundaries and the statistics of high frequency, broadband acoustic fields using a combination of at-sea measurements, ground truth and theoretical modeling. The influence of the properties of the boundaries to the scattered envelope statistics and noise fields will be examined in detail. The proposed project is designed to (1)

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... ine experimental acoustic data to determine how environmental properties (e.g. roughness or bubble clouds) influence statistical distributions obtained with broadband, acoustic systems in shallow water including SAS and vector sensor systems; (2) test current models or develop models where none exist which link measured environmental parameters (e.g. roughness, bubble distributions) and system characteristics (e.g. bandwidth, frequency) to predict these statistics in realistic shallow-water ocean environments. The proposed effort will lead to methods for modeling and predicting properties that may be used to minimize the negative impact of the environment on: 1) detection and classification of targets on or near the seafloor in shallow water; and 2) processing of data taken with vector sensor arrays. OBJECTIVES The importance of the present work lies in the ability to link scattered envelope distributions to measurable environmental properties such as seafloor patch size, composition or roughness. In conjunction with sonar system parameters, this link will provide the foundation necessary for solving several important problems related to the SAS detection of targets. The direct link between system and environmental parameters via scattering models to the statistical distributions will allow: performance prediction for different systems based on environmental properties, extrapolation of performance to other system/bandwidths, and optimization of system parameters such as frequency/bandwidth to the local environment. Concisely the project objectives are: