Analysis Of Sound Navigation And Ranging

1090 Words3 Pages

How would you go about mapping sea floor when visual methods are impaired with the inability of light to penetrate water? Use a different method to measure it, using a wavelength that can penetrate the depth of the sea. Sound waves can penetrate the deepest depths of the ocean using special equipment produced by the military and commercial companies such as sonar to measure the ocean bottom.
What is sonar?
Sonar which is short for Sound Navigation and Ranging, uses sound waves to calculate distances from objects in water. This information can be used to produce maps of lake bed or sea floor. Sound waves are produced from an active sonar transducer. The sound wave travels outwards from the transducer and bounces off objects on the sea floor. These waves come back to the transducer and if it is specially equipped can measure the change in strength and time it takes to return with a computer. The time between the emission and reception of the wave will make it possible to calculate the distance and angle of the object that the sound wave bounced off of. (NOAA, 2014.).
There are two different types of sonar, active which uses sound to create detailed images by sending a wave out and then recording when it comes back, and passive sonar, which is used to detect sound that is not produced by its own transducer. Active sonar will be covered in more depth later in this paper.
Passive is mostly used for listening purposes. It is used by the military, as making no sound in submarines is a highly advantageous position to be in underwater. Also scientific research that is done by listening to objects in the ocean. Passive sonar cannot be used to locate an object, only listen, unless another passive array is used for a seco...

... middle of paper ...

...es in mapping quality using Side-Scan Sonar and multibeam sonar. (NOAA, 2004.)
Multibeam Sonar
Multibeam Sonar also known as Swath echosounders are used for bathymetric coverage and nature of the sea bed for a survey area. It uses the time it takes for the sound wave to return to produce three dimensional characteristics and depths for the sea floor also known as bathymetry. They were developed by the US Navy and General Instrument to provide aids to underwater navigation for their submarine fleet. It is usually a hull mounted sonar system that provides a swath area coverage of the sea floor. The coverage of the swath is dependent on the depth of the water below the ships sonar system, usually two to four times the depth of the water (NOAA, n.d.). Multibeam uses many transducers to produce different wavelengths along the swath so that the returning wave can be

More about Analysis Of Sound Navigation And Ranging

Open Document