A Tactical Approach to Environmental Uncertainty and Sensitivity

The issues of acoustic sensitivity to environmental parameters and the uncertainty in performance prediction due to lack of accurate environmental inputs are addressed. Special emphasis is given to the current state of affairs and to the importance of communicating in a simple, robust means the uncertainty to the sonar operator. A multistaged approach to estimating sensitivity, computing acoustic propagation uncertainty due to environmental variability is presented. A heuristic approach to estimating the most sensitive environmental parameters is developed. A measurements-based statistical approach is applied to environmental data taken in the Mediterranean Sea to estimate performance uncertainty due to sound speed and geoacoustics uncertainty