Channeling of branched flow in weakly scattering anisotropic media

When waves propagate through weakly scattering but correlated, disordered environments they are randomly focused into pronounced branchlike structures, a phenomenon referred to as branched flow, which has been studied in a wide range of isotropic random media. In many natural environments, however, the fluctuations of the random medium typically show pronounced anisotropies. A prominent example is the focusing of tsunami waves by the anisotropic structure of the ocean floor topography. We study the influence of anisotropy on such natural focusing events and find a strong and nonintuitive dependence on the propagation angle which we explain by semiclassical theory.