title: Reflection of a plane wave from a two-layered seafloor with non-parallel interface between the layers.
abstract: This work studies the reflection coefficient of a plane wave incident on a seafloor consisting of two layers (sediment and substrate), whose interface is linear but not parallel to the water-sediment interface. This is an extension of the well-established and studied reflection coefficient concept for seafloors with parallel layers. Moreover this study introduces the concept of the Coherent Reflection Coefficient (CRC) that extends the usual Rayleigh reflection coefficient definition not only at the water-sediment interface but inside the water column as well. The mathematical formulation of the CRC is derived and its numerical implementation is explained. Based on this implementation a numerical code is developed and incorporated-among other codes-in a user-friendly graphics toolbox that was built to facilitate CRC calculations. Numerical examples for realistic seafloors are presented and the derived results are compared to similar ones for parallel layers, indicating that even for small inclination angles the reflection coefficient difference between parallel and slanted interface layers is substantial, hence cannot be ignored. An imminent application of the extended seafloor model and the CRC introduced in this work is the enhancement of geophysics inversion schemes for the estimation of the seafloor parameters.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Nikolaou Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, GR 700 13 Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
authors.forename: Panagiotis I
authors.initials: PI
authors.lastname: Papadakis
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Nikolaou Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, GR 700 13 Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
authors.forename: George S
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Piperakis
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Applied Technology, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, P.O. Box 1939, 710 04 Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Kalogerakis