Environmental and Statistical Performance Mapping Model for Underwater Acoustic Detection Systems

This manuscript describes a methodology to combine environmental models, acoustic signal predictions, statistical detection models and operations research to form a framework for calculating and communicating performance. This methodology has been applied to undersea target detection systems and has come to be known as Performance Surface modeling. The term Performance Surface refers to a geo-spatial representation of the predicted performance of one or more sensors constrained by all-source forecasts for a geophysical area of operations. Recent improvements in ocean, atmospheric and underwater acoustic models, along with advances in parallel computing provide an opportunity to forecast the effects of a complex and dynamic acoustic environment on undersea target detection system performance. This manuscript describes a new process that calculates performance in a straight-forward ‘sonar-equation’ manner utilizing spatially complex and temporally dynamic environmental models. This performance model is constructed by joining environmental acoustic signal predictions with a detection model to form a probabilistic prediction which is then combined with probabilities of target location to produce conditional, joint and marginal probabilities. These joint and marginal probabilities become the scalar estimates of system performance. This manuscript contains two invited articles recently accepted for publication. The first article describes the Performance Surface model development with sections on current applications and future extensions to a more stochastic model. The second article is written from the operational perspective of a Naval commanding officer with co-authors from the active force. Performance Surface tools have been demonstrated at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) and the Naval Oceanographic Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Center (NOAC) in support of recent naval exercises. The model also has recently been a major representation for the ‘performance’ layer of the Naval