Acoustic reverberation in shallow-water (SW) waveguides has recently become a research area of intensely increasing interest. Much progress has been made in two areas: SW reverberation modeling and seabed scattering. However, these two research communities have not yet had enough communication with each other.

SW reverberation modeling includes the virtual image method, the ray method, the normal-mode method, etc. However, most of these models have not yet fully taken advantage of the progress made by the seabed scattering community.

In the past 30 years, one of the major accomplishments in ocean acoustics is the improvement of understanding seabed scattering. However, there remains a real scarcity of seabed scattering data sets in the low frequency range of 100–2600 Hz.

Motivated by the above-mentioned three “howevers,” researchers from the School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences integrate the energy flux method of SW reverberation with the physics-based seabed scattering models. This integration directly and intuitively results in general expressions for SW reverberation in the angular and modal domains. And the latter expression is the same as the modal reverberation expression derived from the Green's function and boundary perturbation method by Tracey and Schmidt.

The integration also results in a simple relationship between the classic boundary scattering cross sections and the modal scattering matrix in SW waveguides. The bottom roughness spectrum and sediment volume scattering cross section at low grazing angles are inverted. Meanwhile, it is in a frequency range of 150–2500 Hz from the wideband long-range reverberation data by using the Biot seabed geoacoustic model. As a result, it may offer some reference data sets for future analysis of the low-frequency seabed scattering mechanisms.

The research was supported by the ONR OA322 and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The “Integrating the Energy Flux Method for Reverberation with Physics-based Seabed Scattering Models: Modeling and Inversion” has been published in J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (Vol. 134, No. 1, pp. 55-66, July 2013).