Shallow water narrowband coherence measurements in the Florida Strait

A set of measures of coherence are defined and applied to the CALOPS experiment, conducted off the coast of Florida in the summer of 2007. A set of narrowband CW tones were transmitted from a towed source received on a 118-element bottom mounted horizontal line array (206 m aperture) with broadside oriented along the 250 m isobath. Two coherence measures are based upon the eigenvalue spread: the power factor and the eigenvalue ratio. This approach is not sensitive to array element error or model mismatch. Two measures are based upon phase residuals; these include the rms-phase error and the coherence function. Three measures are based upon power responses: beam width, array signal gain degradation, and array gain. These approaches have varying sensitivity to array location errors, model mismatch, signal-to-noise ratio, and the structure of the noise field. A Gaussian noise model is used to infer a coherence length from most of the coherence measures. The primary result is that coherence lengths increase with frequency and are on the order of 200 m, the length of the array. The frequency increased coherence length with frequency goes against conventional wisdom, which is to define the coherence length as a fixed number of wavelengths.