Hans G. Schneider
SACLANT Undersea Res. Ctr., Viale San Bartolomeo 400, I-19138 La Spezia, Italy
A method has been reported earlier to compute reverberation from ocean boundaries with the split step PE [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 2257 (1991)]. The formulation is based on the marching solution technique to solve the parabolic wave equation and uses generic backscatter functions for reverberation from the sea surface and/or ocean bottom. Two different schemes have been outlined. The first one, discussed earlier, uses direct reciprocity of propagation. This has the disadvantage that interference phenomena occurring during the forward propagation are also applied to the backscattered field that is unrealistic for incoherently scattered energy. The second approach, discussed here, avoids this by establishing the incoherent scattered field near the boundaries and propagating it backwards in range. In addition different source and receiver characteristics may be used easily and reverberation from bistatic geometries in the plane of propagation can be evaluated with one back-propagation run.