Characterization of the acoustic output of single marine-seismic airguns and clusters: The Svein Vaage dataset.

The acoustical output of marine-seismic airguns is determined from recordings of the sound pressure made on hydrophones suspended below a floating barge from which the airguns are also deployed. The signals from multiple types of airguns are considered and each type is operated over a range of deployment depths and chamber pressures. The acoustical output is characterized in terms of a "source waveform" with dimensions of the pressure-times-distance and in an infinite idealized medium, could be divided by the source-receiver distance to give the sound pressure at that receiver. In more realistic environments, the source waveform may be used to predict the pressure at any arbitrary receiver position simply by the application of a time-domain transfer function describing the propagation between the source and receiver. The sources are further characterized by metrics such as the peak source waveform and energy source level. These metrics are calculated in several frequency bands so that the resulting metrics can be used to characterize the acoustical output of the airguns in terms of their utility for seismic image-processing or possible effects on marine life. These characterizations provide reference data for the calibration of models that predict the airguns' acoustical output. They are validated via comparisons of the acoustic pressure measured on far-field hydrophones and predicted using the source waveforms. Comparisons are also made between empirically derived expressions relating the acoustic metrics to the chamber volume, chamber pressure, and deployment depth and similar expressions from the literature.

Geoacoustic inversion using multipath pulse shape.

Experimental data, measured in a shallow water region of the Mediterranean Sea, are used to show that the variation of received intensity with time is well described by existing expressions [Harrison and Nielsen, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 1362-1373 (2007)]. These expressions indicate that the effect of the sea-water sound speed profile can be neglected for times greater than the peak intensity arrival. Beyond this time, intensity is shown to decay at a rate determined by the seabed acoustic properties in a manner very similar to that for an isovelocity water column. It is shown that a method of determining seabed acoustic properties, previously restricted to isovelocity water columns [Prior and Harrison, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 1341-1344 (2004)], can consequently be used in the presence of a sound-speed profile. The method relates the decay rate of smeared multipath arrivals to the angular derivative of seabed reflection loss. Two datasets are studied and the method is used to describe average seabed properties and to detect changes in seabed type. The seabed descriptions thus derived are used to predict total received intensity as a function of source-receiver separation. Agreement between the propagation measurements and predictions is shown to be within measurement uncertainties.