Transarctic acoustic telemetry

Abstract

On April 9 and 13, 1999, two Arctic Climate Observation Using Underwater Sound tomography signals were transmitted from a 20.5-Hz acoustic source moored at the Franz Victoria Strait to an eight-element, 525-m vertical array at ice camp APLIS in the Chukchi Sea at a distance of ∼2720 km. The transmitted signal was a 20-min long, 255-digit m-sequence that can be treated as a binary-phase shift-keying communication signal with a data rate of 2 bits/s. The almost error-free performance using either spatial diversity (three elements) for a single transmission or temporal diversity (two transmissions) with a single element demonstrates the feasibility of ice-covered trans-Arctic acoustic communications.