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Waveform Transformations Across Land/Water/Air Interfaces – LAW 6.1 (WO Branding)

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center

Nov. 23, 2022 | 8:01

To optimize a smart transparent battle space on tomorrow’s multi-domain battlefields, the Army needs an accurate method to detect and interpret acoustic and seismic signals that travel across diverse boundaries. This is most significant in contested littoral zones, where land, air and water (LAW) domains converge.

Fully characterizing broadband pressure signals that propagate across LAW interfaces can provide early warning or intelligence and provides a capability to quantify transparency across the operational environment. However, it is difficult to interpret signals that have crossed media boundaries because historic studies have only focused on each distinctive medium. There is no comprehensive physics framework that can accurately predict how disorderly waveforms freely traverse these boundaries, leaving a critical basic science knowledge gap.

To overcome these challenges, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center launched a new trans-disciplinary basic research (6.1) project to characterize the full LAW wavefield within a littoral zone. The fusion of disciplines -- including air and underwater acoustics, geophysics, and hydrology -- aims to develop a full-wavefield description of coupled media in the environment.