Reflection of a plane wave from a seafloor with non-parallel interface between the layers

What is it about?

This work studies the reflection coefficient of a plane wave incident on a seafloor consisting of two layers (sediment and substrate), whose interface is linear but not parallel to the water-sediment interface. This is an extension of the well-established and studied reflection coefficient concept for seafloors with parallel layers. Moreover this study introduces the concept of the Coherent Reflection Coefficient (CRC) that extends the usual Rayleigh reflection coefficient definition not only at the water-sediment interface but inside the water column as well. Numerical examples for realistic seafloors are presented and the derived results are compared to similar ones for parallel layers, indicating that even for small inclination angles the reflection coefficient difference between parallel and slanted interface layers is substantial, hence cannot be ignored.

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Why is it important?

An imminent application of the extended seafloor model and the CRC introduced in this work is the enhancement of geophysics inversion schemes for the estimation of the seafloor parameters.