Investigation of horizontal refraction on Florida Straits continental shelf using a three-dimensional Gaussian ray bundling model.

Acoustic transmission loss measurements from the calibration operations (CALOPS) experiment for the Shallow Water Array Performance (SWAP) program included horizontally refracted returns that were as much as 30° away from the true bearing between source and receiver. In many cases, the in-shore refracted path was 20 dB stronger than the true bearing path. In this study CALOPS transmission loss measurements at 415 Hz are compared to predictions from a three-dimensional Gaussian ray bundling model. The geoacoustic model that provides good model-data comparison is consistent with the geologic and sediment core data collected at the location but differs slightly from the bottom model used at lower frequencies (206 and 52.5 Hz) in a previous study.