2025 NESCAFE recovery

The experiment is meant to characterize the highly variable acoustic propagation caused by the Gulf Stream that is observed in this area. The variability is manifested in the acoustic impulse responses and the ambient soundscape and is caused by oceanographic and atmospheric processes as well as complex seafloor topography. The main challenge of this experiment will be to see if the acoustic arrival pattern of the observations is predictable given some base of information. That is to say: can we identify the ray paths and ducted energy based upon the available environmental information? The environmental information can come from climatology, ocean models (such as HYCOM), or local observations. If the paths or ducted modes can be identified we seek to answer two further questions: 1) Can the observations be used to infer properties of the sound-speed profiles? and 2) Can we predict the statistics of the arrivals? (such as the TL distribution and the space-time coherence.)