• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2024

For measuring the performance of passive sonars, we usually consider the maximum Detection Range (DR) under the environment and system parameters in operation. In shallow water, where sound waves inevitably interacts with sea surface or bottom, detection generally maintains up to the maximum range. In deep water, however, sound waves may not interact with sea surface or/and bottom, and thus there may exist shadow zones where sound waves can hardly reach. In this situation, DR alone may not completely define the performance of each sonar. For complete description of sonar performance, we employ the concept 'Robustness Of Detection (ROD)'. In the coastal region of the East Sea, the spatial variations of water masses have close relations with DR and ROD, where the two parameters show reverse spatial variations in general. The spatial and temporal analysis of the temperature by employing the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) shows that the 1-st mode represents typical pattern of seasonal variation and the 2-nd mode represents strength variations of mixed layers and currents. The two modes are estimated to explain about 92 % of the variations. Assuming two types of targets located at the depths of 5 m (shallow) and 100 m (deep), the passive sonar performance (DR) gives high negative correlations (about -0.9) with the first two modes. Most of temporal variations of temperature occur from the surface up to 200 m in the water column so that when we assume a target at 100 m, we can expect detection performance of little seasonal variations with passive sonars below 100 m.