Abstract
More than 35 years ago, a book "Sound Transmission through a Fluctuating Ocean" was published by a group of members of the JASON study group. That book presented a number of theoretical ideas about the effects of oceanic internal waves on acoustic propagation. These ideas were taken from other fields of physical sciences. An example is the studies of twinkling starlight due to propagation through atmospheric turbulence. These studies were adequate for the development of adaptive optics. Such ideas are a reasonable starting point for developing an understanding of some features of ocean acoustic propagation. Unfortunately, these ideas were subsequently treated as lore, rather than as conjectures to be tested by a rigorous application of the scientific method.
The current book is an update of that previous book. Much of the theoretical conjecture from the previous book is again presented as fact, and the justification is still missing. The ocean case is quite different from the starlight case for a number of reasons. Two major reasons are that the wavelengths in the optics case are much smaller in relation to the medium fluctuation than are they in the acoustics case and the oceanic correlation scales in the vertical are much smaller than in the horizontal, and propagations of interest in the topic of this book are mostly horizontal.