Surface reverberation spectrum of underwater sound

A general formulation is derived for the power spectrum of fluctuations in the signal received by way of reflection from a rough sea surface, in terms of an arbitrary wavenumber-frequency spectrum of the surface waves and an arbitrary source directivity function. The formulation is then applied to the specific case of backscatter for which the extreme cases of acoustically slightly rough and very rough sea surfaces are examined in detail. The results of the analysis are compared with experiments, and with the somewhat more restricted results of other theoretical work.