Seabed Texture and Evolution Studies: Applying and Advancing Procedural Methods for Sonar Characterization and Simulation in Dynamic Ocean Environments

The littoral seafloor is a dynamic environment; hydrodynamic and biologic forces continuously modify the seabed relief. For example, sandy environments are often particularly active, with storm and tidal forces organizing sediment into orbital ripples while bottom-feeding and bottom-dwelling organisms rework the seafloor (i.e. bioturbation), destroying this structure and returning it to random equilibrium. Understanding and predicting the temporal evolution of the seafloor is vital for a variety of oceanographic (e.g. hydrodynamic flow in the presence of sand ripples) and acoustic (e.g. synthetic aperture sonar-based detection) techniques. The importance of this work lies in the ability to link measurable environmental properties to biologic and hydrodynamic mechanisms that modify the seabed, with an emphasis on the representation of the seabed in synthetic sonar imagery. While complete understanding of all associated processes is not feasible, it is expected that this work will elucidate several key aspects and precipitate a tangible improvement in both our understanding of, and modeling and simulation of, the dynamic seabed environment.