Signal and reverberation prediction for active sonar by adding acoustic components

A practical, versatile approach to sonar performance prediction is presented based on addition of acoustic components. Often reverberation is written as a decibel sum of a propagation term and a scattering term. This separation is not possible when back-scattering strength is angle-dependent because the reverberation is an integral over angle. For this reason a linear form of the reverberation sonar equation is used. Examples are presented for a typical deep water problem including a calculation against frequency showing an optimum detection frequency which varies with the target range