development and application of a numerical model for predicting the frequency response of the seabed from vertical profiles of sediment impedance

Interaction of normal incidence, wideband acoustic pulses with seabed is investigated to determine the acoustic frequency ranges that provide the most information about the sediment structure. An exact numerical model is developed for calculating the frequency response and impulse response of the seabed from an impedance profile of a sediment core. A database of impedance profiles from several ocean environments were studied to describe the shapes of commonly found impedance changes. The impulse response of the seabed is convolved with acoustic pulses to generate synthetic acoustic returns. The synthetic profiles are studied to determine the effect of operating frequency and bandwidth on resolution and on the accuracy of measuring impedance changes. This thesis explains why inversion procedures have failed to generate vertical impedance profiles of the seabed from normal incidence reflection data. The results of this work provide guidelines for selecting subbottom profiler array sizes and operating frequencies for quantitative sediment studies, and for subsampling cores.