Calibration of an acoustic system for measuring 2-D temperature distribution around hydrothermal vents.

One of the fundamental purposes of quantitative acoustic surveys of seafloor hydrothermal vents is to measure their 2-D temperature distributions. Knowing the system latencies and the acoustic center-to-center distances between the underwater transducers in an acoustic tomography system is fundamental to the overall accuracy of the temperature reconstruction. However, commercial transducer sources typically do not supply the needed data. Here we present a novel calibration algorithm to automatically determine the system latencies and the acoustic center-to-center distances. The possible system latency error and the resulting temperature error are derived and analyzed. We have also developed the experimental setup for calibration. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed calibration method, an experimental study was performed on acoustic imaging of underwater temperature fields in Lake Qiezishan, located at Longling County, Yunnan Province, China. Using the calibrated data, the reconstructed temperature distributions closely resemble the actual distributions measured with thermocouples, thus confirming the effectiveness of our algorithm.