校准海水声速方案.docVIP

454 IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 31, NO. 2, APRIL 2006 Calibration of a Seawater Sound Velocimeter Aaron D. Sweeney, C. David Chadwell, and John A. Hildebrand Abstract—We calibrated a sound velocimeter to a precision of 0.034 m/s using Del Grosso’s sound-speed equation for seawater at temperatures of 2, 7.2, 11.7, and 18 C in a tank of seawater of salinity 33.95 at one atmosphere. The sound velocimeter measures the time-of-flight of a 4-MHz acoustic pulse over a 20-cm path by adjusting the carrier frequency within a 70-kHz band until the pulse and its echo are inphase. We used the adjustable carrier frequency to determine the internal timing characteristics of the sound velocimeter to nanosecond precision. Similarly, soundspeed measurements at four different temperatures determined the acoustic pathlength to micrometer precision. The velocimeter was deployed in the ocean from the surface to 4500 dbar alongside conductivity, temperature, and pressure sensors (CTD). We demonstrated agreement of 0.05 m/s (three parts in 105) with CTD-derived sound speed using Del Grosso’s seawater equation from 500 to 4500 dbar after removing a bias and a trend. Index Terms—Calibration, conductivity measurement, conductivity, temperature, and pressure sensors (CTD), least squares methods, marine technology, pressure effects, sound-speed measurements, sound velocimeter, temperature control, time measurement, underwater acoustic measurements, underwater acoustics. I. INTRODUCTION PRECISE and accurate measurements of sound speed to 0.015 m/s (1 part in 10 ) are important for propagation studies probing ocean temperatures [1] and for geodetic surveys of ocean-bottom transponders [2]. Sound-speed errors of this size may contribute to a bias in estimated temperature of several millidegrees. Geodetic surveys of ocean-bottom transponders rely on centimeter-precision range estimates over 1 km paths, by measuring time-of-flight of an acoustic signal. The most direct measurement of s