title: Measuring the Kuroshio Current with ocean acoustic tomography.
abstract: Ocean current profiling using ocean acoustic tomography (OAT) was conducted in the Kuroshio Current southeast of Taiwan from August 20 to September 15, 2009. Sound pulses were transmitted reciprocally between two acoustic stations placed near the underwater sound channel axis and separated by 48 km. Based on the result of ray simulation, the received signals are divided into multiple ray groups because it is difficult to resolve the ray arrivals for individual rays. The average differential travel times from these ray groups are used to reconstruct the vertical profiles of currents. The currents are estimated with respect to the deepest water layer via two methods: An explicit solution and an inversion with regularization. The strong currents were confined to the upper 200 m and rapidly weakened toward 500 m in depth. Both methods give similar results and are consistent with shipboard acoustic Doppler current profiler results in the upper 150 m. The observed temporal variation demonstrates a similar trend to the prediction from the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima 739-8527, Japan.
authors.forename: Naokazu
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Taniguchi
authors.forename: Chen-Fen
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Arata
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kaneko
authors.forename: Cho-Teng
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Bruce M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Howe
authors.forename: Yu-Huai
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yih
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Ju
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Xiao-Hua
authors.initials: XH
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Noriaki
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gohda
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation; D004301:Doppler Effect; D004867:Equipment Design; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion; D009791:Oceanography / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D012623:Seawater; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013016:Sound; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013624:Taiwan; D013696:Temperature; D013997:Time Factors; D014159:Transducers; D014872:Water Movements