Instrumentation for the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) prototype Pacific Ocean network

The prototype Pacific Ocean network for the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) program consists of two shore-cabled acoustic sources, two autonomous vertical hydrophone receiving arrays, and 16 U.S. Navy hydrophone arrays. The sources, receivers, and signaling strategy are designed to be capable of up to 10-megameter transmissions on a routine basis. A new broadband, low-frequency (75 Hz), acoustic source was designed and built by Alliant Techsystems. The bender-bar/barrel-stave transducer is pressure compensated for operation to 1000-m depth. Signal waveform shaping is employed to broaden the effective bandwidth of the source to 37.5 Hz (Q=2; time resolution of 27 ms). Four-element vertical hydrophone arrays are attached to the sources to permit reciprocal transmissions and ambient noise monitoring. Autonomous vertical hydrophone arrays consisting of 40 elements at 35-m spacing (1400-m aperture) were developed to resolve low-order acoustic modes. The autonomous arrays are designed for deployments of up to 1 year, with intermediate readout of the data via ship-recoverable pop-up data modules. The U.S. Navy hydrophone arrays were instrumented with 80486-based data acquisition and processing systems, with communications links for transmitting the data in near real time to a central site for further processing and archiving.