Forward scattering of pulses from a rough sea surface by Fourier synthesis of parabolic equation solutions

A variable depth step implementation of the range-dependent acoustic model (RAM) is applied to the modeling of forward scattering from a rough sea surface. The sea surface is treated within RAM simply as an internal interface between a water layer and an air upper halfspace. A comparison with a numerically exact integral equation is undertaken for the scattering of single frequencies from Pierson-Moskowitz sea surfaces. The method is extended to model the variability of linear frequency modulated pulses from a series of frozen sea surfaces in a shallow water waveguide. The subsequent effect of rough boundary scattering on the replica correlation process is investigated. (C) 2003 Acoustical Society of America.