Study on the high precision acoustic measurement techniques for determining temperature field around seafloor hydrothermal vent

This paper presents the basis of acoustic method used for temperature field measurement of seafloor hydrothermal vent and two techniques of the parabolic interpolation and the bending compensation of propagation paths of acoustic signal are introduced. Experimental research is performed to exactly rebuild the temperature field around hot springs on the floor of Qiezishan Lake, Yunnan, China. The accuracy of the travel time estimation has been improved based on the aforementioned technique and method. At the same time, by comparison of the results of temperature field with different means, the max absolute error, the maximum relative error and the root mean square error are given. It shows that the technique and the method presented in the paper can be applied to the temperature field measurement detector around the seafloor hydrothermal vent. It also has a good accuracy.