Acoustic sampling volume revisited

At the OCEANS 2010 Conference in Seattle, J. E. Ehrenberg co-authored a paper [Steig et al; doi: 10.1109/OCEANS.2010.5664422] that addressed a fundamental problem in fisheries acoustics: that of quantitative sampling. A definition was formulated for the “effective sampling volume of the hydroacoustic system.” As noted in the paper, the effective beam width of the acoustic system is a function of the backscattering cross section, or its logarithmic measure, the target strength, of the fish being observed. However, the effective beam width is also fundamentally stochastic. Given the impetus of the cited paper, an earlier work on the acoustic sampling volume [K. G. Foote, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 959 (1991); doi: 10.1121/1.401963] is reexamined, with further reference to a recent bistatic generalization of the acoustic sampling volume [K. G. Foote; IEEE J. Oceanic Eng., 43, 749 (2018); doi: 10.1109/JOE.2017.2713538].