Alternatives to traditional probabilistic approaches for incorporating environmental uncertainty in ocean acoustics

Quantifying environmental uncertainty and its corresponding mapping onto the acoustic field is a subject of considerable importance for underwater acoustics modeling and simulation. The ability to make accurate numerical predictions of basic acoustic quantities, as well as sonar system performance in complex ocean environments depends, in part, on objectively quantifying our imperfect knowledge of the waveguide properties. Over the past few years, a number of approaches have been considered to quantify uncertainty in ocean-acoustics modeling; these methods are grounded in some form of traditional probabilistic reasoning. While probability theory provides a natural framework for representing and quantifying environmental uncertainty, a significant amount of information must be available to specify density functions for the parameters and fields so that the corresponding acoustic field statistics can be computed. This talk will overview alternatives to traditional probability-based reasoning that have been ...