Comparisons of laboratory scale measurements of three-dimensional acoustic propagation with solutions by a parabolic equation model.

In this paper, laboratory scale measurements of long range across-slope acoustic propagation in a three-dimensional (3-D) wedge-like environment are compared to numerical solutions. In a previous work, it was shown that the experimental data contain strong 3-D effects like mode shadow zones and multiple mode arrivals, in qualitative agreement with theoretical and numerical predictions. In the present work, the experimental data are compared with numerical solutions obtained using a fully 3-D parabolic equation based model. A subspace inversion approach is used for the refinement of some of the parameters describing the model experiment. The inversion procedure is implemented in a Bayesian framework based on the exhaustive search over the parameter space. The comparisons are performed both in the time and in the frequency domain using the maximum a posteriori estimates of the refined parameters as input in the 3-D model. A very good quantitative agreement is achieved between the numerical predictions provided by the 3-D parabolic equation model and the experimental data.