Biomedical subjects

Nicholas C Makris

Publications and source records attributed to Nicholas C Makris.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Fish population and behavior revealed by instantaneous continental shelf-scale imaging.

Until now, continental shelf environments have been monitored with highly localized line-transect methods from slow-moving research vessels. These methods significantly undersample fish populations in time and space, leaving an incomplete and ambiguous record of abundance and behavior. We show that fish populations in continental shelf environments can be instantaneously imaged over thousands of square kilometers and continuously monitored by a remote sensing technique in which the ocean acts as an acoustic waveguide. The technique has revealed the instantaneous horizontal structural characteristics and volatile short-term behavior of very large fish shoals, containing tens of millions of fish and stretching for many kilometers.

Acoustics↗

PubMed2006

Ocean acoustic hurricane classification.

Theoretical and empirical evidence are combined to show that underwater acoustic sensing techniques may be valuable for measuring the wind speed and determining the destructive power of a hurricane. This is done by first developing a model for the acoustic intensity and mutual intensity in an ocean waveguide due to a hurricane and then determining the relationship between local wind speed and underwater acoustic intensity. From this it is shown that it should be feasible to accurately measure the local wind speed and classify the destructive power of a hurricane if its eye wall passes directly over a single underwater acoustic sensor. The potential advantages and disadvantages of the proposed acoustic method are weighed against those of currently employed techniques.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2006

The array invariant.

A method is derived for instantaneous source-range estimation in a horizontally stratified ocean waveguide from passive beam-time intensity data obtained after conventional plane-wave beamforming of acoustic array measurements. The method has advantages over existing source localization methods, such as matched field processing or the waveguide invariant. First, no knowledge of the environment is required except that the received field should not be dominated by purely waterborne propagation. Second, range can be estimated in real time with little computational effort beyond plane-wave beamforming. Third, array gain is fully exploited. The method is applied to data from the Main Acoustic Clutter Experiment of 2003 for source ranges between 1 to 8 km, where it is shown that simple, accurate, and computationally efficient source range estimates can be made.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2005

Long range acoustic imaging of the continental shelf environment: the Acoustic Clutter Reconnaissance Experiment 2001.

An active sonar system is used to image wide areas of the continental shelf environment by long-range echo sounding at low frequency. The bistatic system, deployed in the STRATAFORM area south of Long Island in April-May of 2001, imaged a large number of prominent clutter events over ranges spanning tens of kilometers in near real time. Roughly 3000 waveforms were transmitted into the water column. Wide-area acoustic images of the ocean environment were generated in near real time for each transmission. Between roughly 10 to more than 100 discrete and localized scatterers were registered for each image. This amounts to a total of at least 30000 scattering events that could be confused with those from submerged vehicles over the period of the experiment. Bathymetric relief in the STRATAFORM area is extremely benign, with slopes typically less than 0.5 degrees according to high resolution (30 m sampled) bathymetric data. Most of the clutter occurs in regions where the bathymetry is locally level and does not coregister with seafloor features. No statistically significant difference is found in the frequency of occurrence per unit area of repeatable clutter inside versus outside of areas occupied by subsurface river channels.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

Spectral and modal formulations for the Doppler-shifted field scattered by an object moving in a stratified medium.

Spectral and normal mode formulations for the three-dimensional field scattered by an object moving in a stratified medium are derived using full-field wave theory. The derivations are based on Green's theorem for the time-domain scalar wave equation and account for Doppler effects induced by target motion as well as source and receiver motion. The formulations are valid when multiple scattering between the object and waveguide boundaries can be neglected, and the scattered field can be expressed as a linear function of the object's plane wave scattering function. The advantage of the spectral formulation is that it incorporates the entire wave number spectrum, including evanescent waves, and therefore can potentially be used at much closer ranges to the target than the modal formulation. The normal mode formulation is more computationally efficient but is limited to longer ranges. For a monochromatic source that excites N incident modes in the waveguide, there will be roughly N2 distinct harmonic components in the scattered field. The Doppler shifts in the scattered field are highly dependent upon the waveguide environment, target shape, and measurement geometry. The Doppler effects are illustrated through a number of canonical examples.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Necessary conditions for a maximum likelihood estimate to become asymptotically unbiased and attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound. II. Range and depth localization of a sound source in an ocean waveguide.

Analytic expressions for the first order bias and second order covariance of a maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE) are applied to the problem of localizing an acoustic source in range and depth in a shallow water waveguide with a vertical hydrophone array. These expressions are then used to determine necessary conditions on sample size, or equivalently signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), for the localization MLE to become asymptotically unbiased and attain minimum variance as expressed by the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). These analytic expressions can be applied in a similar fashion to any ocean-acoustic inverse problem involving random data. Both deterministic and completely randomized signals embedded in independent and additive waveguide noise are investigated. As the energy ratio of received signal to additive noise (SANR) descends to the lower operational range of a typical passive localization system, source range and depth estimates exhibit significant biases and have variances that can exceed the CRLB by orders of magnitude. The spatial structure of the bias suggests that acoustic range and depth estimates tend to converge around particular range and depth cells for moderate SANR values.

Environment↗

PubMed2002

Validity of the sonar equation and Babinet's principle for scattering in a stratified medium.

The sonar equation rests on the assumption that received sound pressure level after scattering can be written in decibels as a sum of four terms: source level, transmission loss from the source to the target, target strength, and transmission loss from the target to the receiver. This assumption is generally not valid for scattering in a shallow water waveguide and can lead to large errors and inconsistencies in estimating a target's scattering properties as well as its limiting range of detection. By application of coherent waveguide scattering theory, the sonar equation is found to become approximately valid in a shallow water waveguide when the object's complex scatter function is roughly constant over the equivalent horizontal grazing angles +/- delta psi spanned by the dominant waveguide modes. This is approximately true (1) for all objects of spatial extent L and wavelength lambda when 2delta psi<lambda/2L and (2) for spheres and certain other rounded objects in nonforward scatter azimuths, even when (1) does not hold. The sonar equation may be made valid by lowering the active frequency of operation in a waveguide. This is often desirable because it greatly simplifies the analysis necessary for target classification and localization. Similarly, conditions are given for when Babinet's principle becomes approximately valid in a shallow water waveguide.

Journal Article↗