Shallow Water Acoustic Propagation at Arraial do Cabo, Brazil

The Brazilian coastal region is a huge platform where the propagation is dominantly in a waveguide delimited by the surface and the bottom. The region near Arraial do Cabo is a place where there is a special sound speed profiles (SSP) regimes related to shallow waters. For some particular environmental and signal parameters, shallow water means a region where the acoustic waveguide propagation occurs for low as well as intermediary frequencies. This work aims to describe some characteristics of waveguide propagation with typical sound speed profile of this place. The modal and ray tracing theories were described with experimental results. Discussion about how the fluctuations of environmental parameters would affect the waveguide in shallow waters were introduced.