A curious thought on DW passive sonar detection range

[feld]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

Maybe what we really want is not so much a real-time state-of-the-art sound propagation model, as the ability to enter real-life meteorological and oceanographic data from online databases, and use an off-line sonar model to generate a family of prop-loss curves to represent an environment that we've provinced off ourselves during scenario generation.

Concur. Being able to define the SSP in "boxes" like the wind and current would be great. But we would be re-writing the DW SONAR model, I think, b/c it applies the same SSP over the whole 600 nm x 600 nm mission area. The new model would be the "range-dependent" proploss I referred to a few posts back.

Mission designers can work around this by choosing the SSP for the area where the preponderance of the ASW action will take place. That works ok as long as there's only one applicable SSP type. But this might not be the case, especially if the mission you're contemplating takes place over a large area, like a Theater ASW campaign or a Red Storm Rising-like convoy escort mission. The acoustic conditions in the littorals are also highly variable over large areas and so more "modern" naval missions involving submarines can be tough to do well.

-feld