Influence of the spatial coherence of the background noise on high resolution passive methods

Research directed towards the improvement of underwater passive listening technique has led to powerful methods but which require the knowledge of the spatial coherences of the sources and of the background noise. They are sensitive to the shape of the wavefront of the signals from the sources. But they are also sensitive to the spatial coherence of the background noise : this is shown in this paper in particular for the method of the indentification of the components of the noisefield from the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the spectral density matrix of the signals received on the array.