Research of sound propagation characteristics in arctic dual-channel marine environments

Abstract The Arctic Ocean has special marine environment and channel conditions, in which the dual-channel is a common marine environment in the Arctic ice area, and the study of sound propagation characteristics of the Arctic dual-channel marine environment is crucial for underwater acoustic target detection and location, underwater acoustic communication, and inversion of environmental parameters in the Arctic Ocean. In this paper, a simulation study is carried out to investigate the sound propagation characteristics of dual-channel sound in the polar ice region. An underwater sound velocity profile in the Arctic region is obtained from the summer hydrographic data of the Nordic Sea Station Position 1, and the effect of the presence of ice floes and the thickness of the ice on the sound transmission loss of the dual-channel sound is computed by using the simulation with the Kraken Normal Mode for this sound velocity profile. The simulation results show that the ice layer generally increases the propagation loss of the sound channel, and the loss increases with the increase of ice thickness. At the same time, an increase in the frequency of the sound source also leads to an increase in transmission loss. In contrast, at lower source frequencies, the presence or absence of ice and its thickness have little effect on the transmission loss, and the dual-channel exhibits some frequency selectivity.