An adaptive particle filtering approach to tracking modes in a varying shallow ocean environment

The shallow ocean environment is ever changing mostly due to temperature variations in its upper layers (<; 100m) directly affecting sound propagation throughout. The need to develop processors that are capable of tracking these changes implies a stochastic as well as an “adaptive” design. The stochastic requirement follows directly from the multitude of variations created by uncertain parameters and noise. Some work has been accomplished in this area, but the stochastic nature was constrained to Gaussian uncertainties. It has been clear for a long time that this constraint was not particularly realistic leading a Bayesian approach that enables the representation of any uncertainty distribution. Sequential Bayesian techniques enable a class of processors capable of performing in an uncertain, nonstationary (varying statistics), non-Gaussian, variable shallow ocean. In this paper adaptive processors providing enhanced signals for acoustic hydrophone measurements on a vertical array as well as enhanced modal function estimates are developed. Synthetic data is provided to demonstrate that this approach is viable.