Assessing the horizontal refraction of ocean acoustic tomography signals using high-resolution ocean state estimates

The analysis of signals for acoustic tomography sent between a source and a receiver most often uses the unrefracted geodesic path, an approximation that is justified from theoretical considerations, relying on estimates of horizontal gradients of sound speed, or on simple theoretical models. To quantify the effects of horizontal refraction caused by a realistic ocean environment, horizontal refractions of long-range signals were computed using global ocean state estimates for 2004 from the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO2) project. Basin-scale paths in the eastern North Pacific Ocean and regional-scale paths in the Philippine Sea were used as examples. At O(5 Mm) basin scales, refracted geodesic and geodesic paths differed by only about 5 km. Gyre-scale features had the greatest refractive influence, but the precise refractive effects depended on the path geometry with respect to oceanographic features. Refraction decreased travel times by 5-10 ms and changed azimuthal angles by about 0.2°. At O(500 km) regional scales, paths deviated from the geodesic by only 250 m, and travel times deviated by less than 0.5 ms. Such effects are of little consequence in the analysis of tomographic data. Refraction details depend only slightly on mode number and frequency.