Geological and Geophysical Reconnaissance for the ONR Geoclutter Program

The common goals of the Geoclutter program are to: (1) understand the acoustic scattering process in shallow water, in order to design physics-based signal processing algorithms to distinguish acoustic returns originating from naturally-occurring features on the world's continental shelves (e.g., iceberg scours, shallow gas accumulations, outcrops of high-amplitude shallow subsurface reflectors, shallowly-buried meandering channels), i.e., “geoclutter”, from man-made targets of similar dimensions (e.g., submarines), and (2) to predict the distribution and properties of geoclutter at a U.S. continental shelf test site, with eventual application to other regions of Navy interest.