Abstract
The relation between the tidal current and the acoustic signal measured at vertical line arrays (VLAs) is investigated from data of the shallow-water acoustic variability experiment 2015 performed in the northeastern East China Sea. From the channel impulse response, the arrival structure measured on the VLA was observed to vary with semidiurnal tidal period. To explain this phenomenon, the direction of the array tilt is assumed to be consistent with the current flow direction. The modeling results based on ray tracing prove the relation between the variation of the arrival structure and array tilt angle in a time-varying form, yielding an estimation of tidal currents in the region. We compared the projected time series of horizontal currents to the acoustic paths with the curvature variation in the arrival structure to validate our results and confirmed that they are consistent with each other.