DYNAMICAL SIMULATION OF UNDERWATER SOUND PROPAGATION IN THE HORMOZ STRAIT

Providing an illustration of sound propagation in the Hormoz Strait, this paper is about acoustic wave propagation in shallow water for a harmonic point source with low frequency, less than 1000 and solution of a homogenous Helmholtz equation using parabolic equation. C++ programming is used to solve Helmholtz equation [9] and MATLAB software is used to illustrate figures and animate them [6], [7]. The input parameters are water characteristics such as, salinity, temperature, corresponding depth of the surface and of the bottom, in the software, as well as the number of frames. One can view animation of frames and see how salinity and temperature can effect on the sound propagation and how grazing angle come closer to the normal (vertical line) with respect to decrease of temperature and increase of salinity and depth in water column and therefore decrease of sound velocity, corresponding to Snell’s law, increase of refraction index and specially at the Hormoz Strait. The convergence zone distances at the surface are more than two kilometres although it lowers at the bottom.