Customer Reviews

Computational Ocean Acoustics

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an excellent comprehensive review of the topics necessary to study ocean acoustics. It moves through the physics of wave propagation, carefully explaining the methods and the use of logarithmic measures. The numerical approaches are well organized and theoretically explained before demonstrating examples and giving "recipes" for simple codes. Everything you need is in this book, including some basic signal processing techniques.

Some of the chapters are written better than others, but to get a look at the whole subject, you can't beat it.

During the last decade, this book has established itself as the definitive reference on Computational Ocean Acoustics. The book reviews most computational techniques very clearly and with proper attention to mathemathical detail. The book is organized systematically with a short introduction on applications and oceanography, a second chapter on the basic physics of wave propagation with emphasis on the ocean environment, before the most important computational techniques (ray tracing, wavenumber integration, normal modes, parabolic equations) are treated in separate chapters. The finite difference and finite elements methods are breafly reviewed in one chapter, as these methods are not very applicable in the problems typical for underwater acoustics.

Based on the first seven chapters alone, this reference work deserves five stars. The one tiny detail I find troublesome here, is the introduction to chapter 2 where the linear wave equation is derived. As I have not read a lot of nonlinear fluid mechanics, I find these two or three pages very confusing. Perhaps this derivation should have been expanded a bit in an appendix. However, this is not a major problem, except for it being an unnecessarily high hurdle to get by when starting reading chapter 2.

The problem with this book becomes obvious when one reads the later chapters, particularly on Matched Field Processing for Source Localization (MFP/SL). The approach is to use the various computational techniques reviewed in the book to find the unknown location of an acoustic source. The solution of this problem is shown to be very sensitive to medium parameters. However, these parameters are not available, so a method termed 'focalization' is used to tune in both the medium parameters and the source position simultaneously. However, in the next instance, the authors claim that precise knowledge the medium parameters, previously accepted to be either unknown or known only with limited presicion, can be used for resolving the azimuth bearing to the source. This makes no sense to me.

As the authors have obviously not contemplated the applications of the reviewed techniques in sufficient detail for them to stand for closer scrutiny, this book only gets two stars from me.