ASA 130th Meeting - St. Louis, MO - 1995 Nov 27 .. Dec 01

1pAO4. Evidence for coastal generation of internal tides from deep-water acoustic observations.

Stanley M. Flatte

Charles Bracher

Dept. of Phys., Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064

In the summer of 1989 a 1000-km acoustic experiment in the Pacific showed a semidiurnal variation in pulse travel time that was coherent in depth and varied systematically across timefronts. The effect of a single-plane-wave, gravest mode, M2, internal tide has been examined by ray tracing and has been found to show the same characteristic variation if the internal tide is coming from the direction of the Gulf of Alaska. In the process of fitting this specific acoustic data, an analysis technique for low-mode internal tides has been developed that can be applied generally to any acoustic tomography experiment.