Acoustic noise interferometry in a time-dependent coastal ocean

Interferometry of underwater noise provides a way to estimate physical parameters of the water column and the seafloor without employing any controlled sound sources. In applications of acoustic noise interferometry to coastal oceans, the propagation environment changes appreciably during the averaging times that are necessary for the Green's functions to emerge from noise cross-correlations. Here, a theory is developed to quantify the effects of nonstationarity of the propagation environment on two-point correlation functions of diffuse noise. It is shown that temporal variability of the ocean limits from above the frequency range, where noise cross-correlations approximate the Green's functions. The theoretical predictions are in quantitative agreement with results of the 2012 noise interferometry experiment in the Florida Straits. The loss of coherence at high frequencies constrains the passive acoustic remote sensing to exploiting a low-frequency part of measured noise cross-correlations, thus limiting the resolution of deterministic inversions. On the other hand, the passively measured coherence loss contains information about statistical characteristics of the ocean dynamics at unresolved spatial and temporal scales.