Physics of Sound in the Sea

PHYSICS OF SOUND IN THE SEA is the distillate of the brightest, most creative minds in the underwater acoustics community during World War II. The primary wartime effort to understand the underwater acoustic environment for the purpose of submarine and antisubmarine warfare was directed by the Subsurface Warfare Division of the National Defense Research Committee. This division organized and directed programs and studies to combine theory with experiment in order to characterize underwater sound transmission for immediate wartime application. Participating in these studies were staff members from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, Columbia, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the U.S. Navy - namely, the Bureau of Ships (now Naval Sea Systems Command), the Radio and Sound Laboratory (now Naval Underwater Systems Center at San Diego), and the Naval Research Laboratory. Dr. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., Director of the Sonar Analysis Group within the Subsurface Warfare Division was responsible for the preparation of Physics of Sound in the Sea. His key editors, named in the Foreword of the book, and many others, unmanned, created an authoritative, understandable underwater sound reference book every bit as useful today as when first written.