Integrated acoustic technologies form new shallow water survey system

Abstract

Total bottom bathymetry, producing high‐resolution bottom and subbottom data in shallow water, has been accomplished through the integration of fanbeam, sidescan sonar, scanning sonar, and impedance profiling acoustics. The project called HI‐MAP (Hydrographic Inland Marine Acoustic Platform) set out in early 1990 to design a multipurpose high‐resolution, shallow water survey system. Today, the system is in full operation, simultaneously generating frequencies of 3.5, 33, 200, 500, 650, and 1000 kHz. HI‐MAP is able to survey large corridors of a river in one pass, acquiring bottom and subbottom bathymetry right up to water's edge.

Included in this article is a discussion of the acquisition technologies used and the new surveying and data processing techniques developed to correlate and “thin” the data. Also presented is a description and the results of the HI‐MAP acceptance test performed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Keywords:

• HI‐MAP
• fanbeam
• John E. Chance
• phased array echo sounder
• TERRAMODEL
• sidescan
• Digital Terrain Model