Wael’s and Aaron’s research on Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder, as part of the Wide Area Ocean Floor Mapping project, sponsored by MIT Lincoln Lab, has been listed in R&D World’s 2024 R&D 100 Awards. Congratulations to Wael and Aaron!

Congratulations to Anantha Narayanan Suresh Babu, a Ph.D. candidate in the MSEAS group, for being awarded a 2024-2025 MathWorks Mechanical Engineering Fellowship! The competitive MathWorks Engineering Fellowships are awarded to the top nominees from all of the academic departments in the School of Engineering, who use MATLAB and/or Simulink to advance discovery and innovation across disciplines. All the best to Anantha!

Congratulations to Ellen Mule for winning the Richard Pittenger Fellowship! The Richard Pittenger Fellowship is awarded annually to a U.S. naval officer in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) Joint Program. The fellowship was established to honor the WHOI’s former vice president of marine operations, who retired in 2004 after 14 years at WHOI and 32 years in the Navy, including a tour as Oceanographer of the Navy. He was a strong advocate for science and engineering education for naval officers.

Underwater sound propagation is sensitive to specific environmental features and specific operational configuration parameters. We illustrate the preliminary use of our deterministic and stochastic Dynamically-Orthogonal Wide-Angle Parabolic Equations (DO-WAPEs) to classify and quantify the effects of ocean uncertainties and source depth uncertainties on the acoustic fields. We showcase initial results for the New England Seamounts off the northeastern US coastline, emphasizing the effects of uncertain source depths and subsurface ocean inflows and acoustic ducts. The stochastic DO-WAPEs predict the probability distribution of the acoustic pressure and transmission loss fields. The mean and standard deviation of the TL field are described and linked to the ocean environment and seamount geometry. Mutual information is predicted to identify the TL locations most informative about the source depth.

The first steps towards integrating autonomous monitoring, probabilistic forecasting, reachability analysis, and adaptive sampling for the Gulf of Mexico were demonstrated in real-time during the collaborative Mini-Adaptive Sampling Test Run (MASTR) ocean experiment, which took place from February to April 2024. The emphasis of this contribution is on the use of the MIT Multidisciplinary Simulation, Estimation, and Assimilation Systems (MSEAS) including Error Subspace Statistical Estimation (ESSE) large-ensemble forecasting and path planning systems to predict ocean fields and uncertainties, forecast reachable sets and optimal paths for gliders, and guide sampling aircraft and ocean vehicles toward the most informative observations. Deterministic and probabilistic ocean forecasts are exemplified and linked to the variability of the Loop Current (LC) and LC Eddies, demonstrating predictive skill by real-time comparisons to independent data. Risk forecasts in terms of probabilities of currents exceeding 1.5 kt were provided. The most informative sampling patterns for Remote Ocean Current Imaging System (ROCIS) flights were forecast using mutual information between surface currents and density anomaly. Finally, we guided four underwater gliders using probabilistic reachability and path-planning forecasts.