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<p>The changing state of warfare has driven the US Navy's area of  operations closer to shore into littoral coastal waters. Mine Warfare has been  proven as an extremely effective means of battlespace control in these waters.  Mines can be inexpensively mass produced and rapidly deployed over large  areas. The most common type of mine in use is the bottom placed mine, an  object with simple geometry that sits on the seafloor. These mines often exhibit  scour induced burial below the seafloor, making detection through traditional  mine hunting methods difficult or impossible, while the mines themselves remain  lethal. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has developed a computer model  that predicts the extent of mine burial to aid mine hunting and mine clearing  operations. Investigations under ONR's Mine Burial Program are presently being  conducted to calibrate and validate this model.  This thesis uses data from the deployment of an acoustically instrumented  model mine near the Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory in part of a larger,  16 total object investigation. A 2-axis pencil beam sonar was deployed  concurrently with the mine to obtain microbathymetric measurements of the  scour pit development and the progression of mine burial. Data correction  techniques to correct for beam pattern induced bathymetry errors and a  transformed coordinate system are detailed within. An analysis of scour pit  dimensions includes scour depth, area, and volume as well as a look into percent  burial by depth as a characteristic measurement important for operational mine  hunting. The progression of mine burial is related to the wave climate, unsteady  flow hydrodynamic forcing, and bed-load transport. The analysis examines the  relative roles of these mechanisms in the scour-infill-bury process.
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<br>Subjects: Mines (Military explosives); Sonar; WHOI theses</div>
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Gotowka, Brendan Reed.</div>
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