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Updated: Jun 24, 2025

Author Spotlight: A Stable Phantom Material for Optical and Acoustic Imaging
Published on: June 16, 2023
Mid-frequency acoustic tracking of breaking waves
Ryan Saenger1, Luc Lenain1, William S Hodgkiss1
1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USArsaenger@ucsd.edu, llenain@ucsd.ed, whodgkiss@ucsd.edu.
Abstract:
Large surface wave breaking events in deep water are acoustically detectable by beamforming at 5-6 kHz with a mid-frequency planar array located 130 m below the surface. Due to the array's depth and modest 1 m horizontal aperture, wave breaking events cannot be tracked accurately by beamforming alone. Their trajectories are estimated instead by splitting the array into sub-arrays, beamforming each sub-array toward the source, and computing the temporal cross-correlation of the sub-array beams. Source tracks estimated from sub-array cross-correlations match the trajectories of breaking waves that are visible in aerial images of the ocean surface above the array.
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