Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing

Director: Prof. Nicholas Makris

The Lab is located on the second floor of building 5, in room 229.

Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing
Room 5-229
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
phone: 617-253-9484

Some Current Research Areas:

Ocean exploration, undersea remote sensing of marine life and geophysical phenomena, wave propagation and scattering theory in remote sensing through random media and waveguides, statistical estimation and information theory in sensing, linear and nonlinear acoustics and seismics, Europa exploration.

• Bose Research Fellowship to Study Early Musical Instruments

Violin Program at the North Bennet Street School, Makris far right, Roman Barnas second from right.

• Future of New England Fisheries

Senator Kerry, Prof. Makris, Prof. Ratilal and other State and Regional officials dicussing the use of OAWRSfor the future of New England fisheries.

• Census of Marine Life

• Fish Population and Behavior Revealed by Instantaneous Continental-Shelf-Scale Imaging
  (link to Science paper and movies is on Prof. Makris' home page)

• OAWRS 2006 Gulf of Maine Experiment Marine Mammal Acoustics

• Thousands of whale vocalizations were recorded during the OAWRS 2006 Gulf of Maine Experiment. Hundreds of Humpback whale vocalizations were recorded each day. The OAWRS towed array was used to passively locate the whales, most of which were found to be near the northern flank of Georges Bank. Preliminary results are presented at the Fall 2010 Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in
• "Simultaneous passive and active detection and localization of humpback whales using data recorded on a towed horizontal receiving array" by Zheng Gong, Duong Tran, Hari Chauhan, Nicholas Makris and Purnima Ratilal
• "Developing a matched-filter kernel for localization of complex sources in a dispersive ocean waveguide with array invariance" by Duong Tran, Hari Chauhan, Zheng Gong, Nicholas Makris and Purnima Ratilal
• Sample recordings of whale vocalzations during the experiment: Sample 1, Sample 2, Sample 3

• Europa Exploration

  

• Probing Europa's Interior with Natural Sound Sources
• Mechanics of tidally driven fractures in Europa's ice shell
• Environmental correlates of pack ice noise
• Environmental correlates of arctic ice edge noise

• Transmission of Sound Through A Random Ocean Waveguide

  • Mean and covariance of the forward field propagated through a stratified ocean waveguide with three-dimensional inhomogeneities
  • Mean and variance of the forward field propagated through three-dimensional random internal waves in a continental-shelf waveguide
  • The effect of saturated transmission scintillation on ocean-acoustic intensity measurements

• Hurricane Classification Using Underwater Sound

  • Ocean Acoustic Hurricane Classification
  • The statistics of ocean-acoustic ambient noise

• Long-range Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS)

  • Long range remote imaging of the continental shelf environment: The Acoustic Clutter Reconnaissance Experiment 2001 Experiment
  • Deterministic reverberation from ocean ridges
  • The bi-azimuthal scattering distribution of an abyssal hill
  • A comparison of bi-static scattering from two geologically distinct abyssal hills
  • Imaging ocean-basin reverberation via inversion
  • Long-range backscatter from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

• Instantaneous Passive Localization of Acoustics Sources in an Ocean Waveguide

  • The array invariant

• Scattering from Objects in an Ocean Waveguide

  • Extinction theorem for object scattering in a stratified medium
  • Spectral and modal formulations for the Doppler-shifted field scattered from an object moving in a stratified medium
  • Validity of the sonar equation and Babinet’s principle for scattering in a stratified medium
  • A unified model for reverberation and submerged object scattering in a stratified ocean waveguide
  • Detection of a submerged object insonified by surface noise in an ocean
    waveguide (Contains First Spectral Formulation for Scattering from Object in Waveguide)
  • Where the "Acoustic Daylight'' analogy breaks down
  • A spectral approach to 3-D object scattering in stratified media applied to scattering from submerged spheres

• Statistical Estimation and Information Theory in Sensing

  • A foundation for logarithmic measures of fluctuating intensity in pattern recognition
  • Necessary conditions for a maximum likelihood estimate to become asymptotically unbiased and attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound, Part I: General approach with an application to time-delay and Doppler shift estimation
  • Necessary conditions for a maximum likelihood estimate to become asymptotically unbiased and attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound Part II: Range and depth localization of a sound source in an ocean waveguide
  • Asymptotic accuracy of geoacoustic inversions
  • Parameter resolution bounds that depend on sample size

   

Collaborator: Prof. Purnima Ratilal, Northeastern University

Links:
Prof. Makris website
Center for Ocean Engineering
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Ocean Acoustics Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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last updated:8.5.22 webmaster