Peter D. Neumann
Grad. Prog. in Acoust., Penn State Univ., P.O. Box 30, University Park, PA 16804
R. Lee Culver
Penn State Univ., University Park, PA 16804
The statistical characteristics of the envelopes of bistatic surface reverberation data taken in January 1992 are compared against the Rayleigh distribution. Agreement with some slight deviations from Rayleigh behavior was found in the statistical characteristics of the data for all available wind speeds (1.4 to 7.2 m/s) at frequencies from 20 to 40 kHz. Additionally, the data were divided in time according to the dominant surface scattering mechanism, surface roughness or bubble layer, and the statistical characteristics of each of these portions examined for Rayleigh behavior. This type of analysis allows for an increased amount of data to be used as a result of using data not only from all of the transmitted pulses but also from a number of different times in the time series instead of at a single time as was done in the first part of the analysis. The statistical characteristics of these portions of the time series were also found to be Rayleigh with only slight deviations in the tails of the distribution. [Work supported by ONT.]