The wave equation with viscoelastic attenuation and its application in problems of shallow-sea acoustics

A suitable tool for the simulation of low frequency acoustic pulse signals propagating in a shallow sea is the numerical integration of the nonstationary wave equation. The main feature of such simulation problems is that in this case the sound waves propagate in the geoacoustic waveguide formed by the upper layers of the bottom and the water column. By this reason, the correct dependence of the attenuation of sound waves in the bottom on their frequency must be taken into account. In this paper we obtain an integro-differential equation for the sound waves in the viscoelastic fluid, which allows to simulate the arbitrary dependence of acoustic wave attenuation on frequency in the time domain computations. The procedure of numerical solution of this equation based on its approximation by a system of differential equations is then considered and the methods of artificial limitation of computational domain are described. We also construct a simple finite-difference scheme for the proposed equation suitable for the numerical solution of nonstationary problems arising in the shallow-sea acoustics.