Simulation study of moving ship tomography for mapping the current wakes of Green Island southeast of Taiwan

This study examines the design of acoustic arrays using moving ship tomography (MST) applied to the horizontal mapping of the Kuroshio-induced current wakes in the lee of Green Island southeast of Taiwan. The acoustic tomographic array consists of six transceivers; each transceiver can be either fixed at one position or towed by a ship. Numerical tomographic experiments using the synthetic ocean currents from the 8 km X 8 km study area are conducted for two configurations: five moored transceivers and one shipboard transceiver or four moored transceivers and two shipboard transceivers. Different spatial configurations of moored and shipboard transceivers are considered. For all configurations the ship moved around the periphery of the study area. Compared with the traditional tomographic arrays with only moored transceivers, the current reconstructions using MST show the reduction in residual error from 21% to 16%. Among all the MST arrays, the smallest residual error variance is obtained for the configur...