SACLANT Sonar Data

The vertical underwater acoustic array data was collected in shallow-water off the Italian west coast by the NATO SACLANT Center in La Spezia, Italy. SACLANT Center has made this data available to the public for the purposes of furthering signal processing research. Researchers who make use of the data should acknowledge the SACLANT Centre as the source of the data in all presentations or publications. The original SACLANT time series has been converted to a series of MATLAB .mat files each of which contains a matrix "dat" that is 48 sensors by 64K data points long. Each file represents about 1 minute of data at the sampling rate of 1 kHz. Note that channel 24 is inverted. Each file has been compressed, and stored under a name ending in ".bin", which forces net browsers to request where to store a file rather than display it. Each file's extension should be changed to ".mat" to enhance compatability with Matlab. The data were recorded on October 26 and 27, 1993, and have been preprocessed to focus on three separate sources. Sound speed profiles were also measured.

Please consult the document for a description of the experiment. A further description of the experiment, along with results for estimating geoacoustic parameters and source position, may be found in papers by D.F. Gingras and P. Gerstoft published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The first appeared in the June 1995 issue (97: 3589-3598), and the second in May 1996 (99: 2839-2850). The sensor depths (in m), and environmental data for each measurement are available. A MATLAB program that calculates cross-spectral matrices from these data illustrates how to read and manipulate the data. Computational acoustic propagation models which can be used when processing this data may be found at the Ocean Acoustics Library. In addition, the input file can be used with the KRAKEN normal mode.

Three papers that develop algorithms and test them on these data are stored on SPIB, namely:
Performance of Matched-Field Beamformers with Mediterranean Vertical Array Data
Robust Matched-Field Beamforming with Benchmark Shallow-Water Acoustic Array Data
Maximum-Likelihood Source Localization in an Uncertain Shallow Water Waveguide

All content provided in this page was formerly made available by Dr. Don H. Johnson at Rice University.
Database Catalog - Array Data - Sonar Data