Evaluation of different Maritime rapid environmental assessment procedures with a focus on acoustic performance

Four different Marine Rapid Environmental Assessment (MREA) procedures are compared with a focus on underwater acoustic performance. Co-located oceanographic-acoustic data were collected during the summer of 2015 in the Northwestern Mediterranean in the framework of a sea trial led by the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation. The data were used to link MREA procedures and ocean-acoustic validation in a seamless framework. The MREA procedures consider Conductivity Temperature Depth (CTD) data, operational products from the Copernicus Marine Service, and two dynamical downscaling systems (with and without data assimilation). A portion of the oceanographic data are used for the assimilation procedure, and the remaining portion is withheld from the assimilation system for use as an independent verifying dataset. The accuracy of modelled acoustic properties is evaluated using the sound speed estimates from the different MREA methodologies as inputs to an acoustic model, and then comparing the modelled and observed acoustic arrival intensities and temporal structure. In 95% of the studied cases, the assimilative dynamical downscaling approach provides acoustic results equaling or exceeding in skill those modelled with the sound speed extracted from CTD casts. Acoustic assessment results indicate that our implementation of dynamical downscaling has skill at oceanographic scales of 4 km, about ten times larger than the ocean model horizontal resolution.